Africa: Experts Seek Inclusion of Agriculture in Climate Talks

Nairobi - More than 60 leading scientists and agricultural leaders have decried the almost total absence of agriculture in the climate talks, warned that the climate is much to be reached next month could lead to widespread famine and food shortages in the years ahead.
Signatories of a statement over the weekend in Rome, Italy, issued by leading thinkers in the development includes five World Food Prize laureates, former heads of development agencies, former Minister of Agriculture, and the heads of the world's leading alliance of agricultural research centers.
Driven by a significant oversight in the global climate talks that led to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month, the leaders said: "No credible or effective agreement to the challenges of climate change to address agriculture and the need for crop adaptation to ignore, to ensure that the world's future food supplies. "
Crop adaptation refers to agriculture's ability to withstand climate change. Farmers problems that they never before experienced much greater weather variability, a higher average temperatures will experience increases in numbers of very hot days, shorter growing season, higher solar radiation, much more moisture stress, added salinity of salt water incursion and irrigation, and new combinations of pests and diseases.
"The adverse impacts of climate change on agriculture, and therefore the production of food, was also a risk for all other efforts to reduce and adapt to new climatic conditions," the statement said. "The magnitude of the change is expected, even in a relatively optimistic scenario, is historically unprecedented, and our agricultural systems are still largely unprepared to face it."
Al, effects of global warming has hit Kenya's agricultural sector. The prolonged drought this year has led to near crop failure. Al's Food and Agriculture Organization of the warning that the maize crop in the country will fall by 30 percent from last year.
The group is negotiating to recognize the importance of crop diversity conservation and use as an essential element in the promises that they will make the climate change adaptation.
"It may be more widely understood that agriculture will have to adapt to climate change, but only because they have to adapt, it does not mean it will not," said Gebisa Ejeta, winner of this year's World Food Price and Distinguished Professor in Agronomy at Purdue University.
"The size of the crop to unprecedented circumstances can not be taken for granted. It requires rigorous research and complex, precise work and a serious commitment of public funding. This should be an urgent priority because of the billions whose future depends away from it. "
Studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) predict that dramatic climate change impacts on food production will have. Some estimates are that crop yields in some areas could drop by as much as one third in just two decades without a direct investment in developing new crop varieties.
"On the farm ready for such dramatic new growing environments is not a trivial matter," warned the signatories. "For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt, but there is no" change the climate of the genes, "not a single trait, which can ensure that their much less to increase their productivity in a new environment will be maintained ,. Concerted efforts will require adjustments to be washed - by yields, country-by-country and internationally. "
The group is calling for small investments now that the easy availability of crop diversity to ensure. "Billions of dollars were promised this year for food security. Billions likely to climate change in Copenhagen is not promising. We urge the negotiators in Copenhagen to recognize how these issues are interwoven.
Without effective investment in agricultural adaptation right now, future food security will soon fall victim to climate change, "said Cary Fowler, executive director, Global Crop Diversity Trust.