HARBIN, Aug. 15 (Xinhua) -- As natural disasters cut farm yields across the world, agricultural experts believe science and technology and international cooperation can play a key role in fighting extreme weather and ensuring food supply for the fast growing world.
"We are far away from achieving food security," Anton Mangstl, director of the Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told the Third Global Forum of Leaders for Agricultural Science and Technology (GLAST-2010) in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.
"We are all aware that the world has a limited amount of cultivated land, water and other types of natural resources, but the population increases rapidly, and catastrophic natural disasters due to global warming aggravate the food supply problem," he said.
By 2050, the world's population is expected to exceed 9 billion, so agricultural output would need to grow by 70 percent to feed everyone, according to FAO estimates.
But the world will face dramatic challenges in achieving this target, as climate change threatens farming output through higher temperatures, changes in rainfall, more frequent and worsening droughts, floods, storms, insect pests and other disasters, warned experts at the forum.
Extreme weather has greatly cut output in many countries this year, forcing Russia, once the world's third-largest wheat exporter, to suspend grain exports and forcing the U.S. government to lower its expectations for global wheat production, which has driven up prices.
SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION
"Scientific and technological innovation is the most fundamental and effective way to improve human ability to cope with climatic disasters," said Luo Fuhe, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) , on the sidelines of the three-day forum that ended Saturday.
"It is possible to develop technology in breeding new varieties of crops that are more drought resistant or flood tolerant, or improving landscape management and irrigation systems to make better use of natural resources," said Trevor Nicholls, chief executive officer of CAB International Head Office based in the United Kingdom.
Nicholls called for more research into killing insect pests, saying as much as 40 percent of the food grown worldwide was lost to pests and diseases, and the increasing global trade flows and climate change were likely to accelerate the spread of known pests and give rise to new pathogens.
Sterile Insect Technique is a type of inset birth control resulting from radiation, where mass reared and systematically released sterile males of the target pest insect mate with wild females in the field, thereby interfering in an environmental-friendly way with the reproduction of the pest population.
But for disasters such landslides and earthquakes, the better way was to improve monitoring and forecasting techniques and find ways to minimize damage, he said.
"Another important task is to develop enough diversity of crops so that disasters in one place would not affect farming or animal breeding somewhere else," said Professor Roger Swift, of the Natural Resources, Agriculture and Veterinary Science Faculty, at the University of Queensland.
The Atomic Energy Institute of Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences (HAAS) has bred 28 new soybean breeds, almost 20 wheat varieties and a dozen corn varieties with higher yields or levels of drought and flood resistance, said Xu Dechun, vice director of the institute.
China had developed a disaster evaluation system, based on remote sensing, that showed better ways to farm in flood-prone regions. The system could also forecast potential grain output in a certain area based on monitoring results of drought and flood data, said Tang Huajun, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences (CAAS).
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
"Agriculture is a worldwide trade. No country can achieve food security alone. All countries must work together to combat challenges," said Luo Fuhe, vice chairman of the CPPCC National Committee.
He called on governments to reinforce cooperation in strategy and policy-making and increase investment and support to agricultural science and technology.
"The food security situation is much more serious in Africa now and we need help from countries with advanced agricultural technologies," said Monty Jones, executive director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.
"We have almost every necessary farming resource, but we still can't feed everybody in the continent. More and more people are getting hungry and dying due to shortages of food and malnutrition," he said.
Jones called for more exchanges of information and research staff, funding of big international programs, and the establishment of joint research centers worldwide.
A wide range of skills was needed to develop agriculture, but the skills did not exist in any one country, so more collaborative teams and projects should be established to share information, experiences and techniques, said Rudy Rabbinge, chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Independent Science and Partnership Council.
China had held training courses for Asian and African countries to improve grain production, said Xu.
GLAST-2010 was jointly sponsored by the CAAS, Heilongjiang provincial government, the FAO and the CGIAR. More than 500 agricultural officials and experts from almost 80 countries and regions, including the United States, France, Canada and Russia, gathered to discuss agricultural policy making and implementation, agricultural science and technology, and international cooperation in the sustainable development of agriculture.
