Global warming 'kitchen' disappearance of potatoes, rice, coffee, cocoa and more products

A world without chocolate? A break without coffee ? Sushi without rice ? The hypothesis seems crazy, but in the face of the threat of climate change , some experts have begun to track urgent the wild ancestors of plants that are part of our diet .

When the “species threatened ”people often think of polar bears, pandas or elephants, but they forget the flora.

“ There are things that we take for granted ” explains Aaron Davis, a scientist at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK. But global warming has consequences on crops as essential as cereals, coffee, tea, cocoa or bananas .

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Some of those species, such as potato or rice, are essential in the diet of billions of human beings. According to a study published in May, about a third of agricultural production would be threatened .

Rice fields, for example, would be directly threatened by rising sea levels, which increases salinity in deltas . The International Potato Center anticipates a 32% drop in harvests between now and 2060.

Regarding coffee and cocoa, several studies project a significant drop in the area of ​​crops, between now and 2050, and of up to 50% in the case of coffee .

For more than 10,000 years, humanity used selective cultivation techniques to adapt plant species to agricultural use in a given environment.

( You can also read: What is methane, the other gas that, if reduced, would seriously reduce global warming )

But that environment is changing rapidly, and perhaps the time has come to recover the original, “wild” versions .

“When you select the ‘best’ , f stupidly you lose some genes. We have lost genetic diversity “, explains Benjamin Kilian, from the Crop Trust foundation.

Consequently, “ the capacity of these crops to adapt to climate change, or other challenges, is necessarily limited “, he explains.

With rising temperatures “ we will need to use as much biodiversity as possible, to reduce risks and offer different options “, insists Marleni Ramírez, expert from an international consortium on CGIAR agricultural research.

Too late?

The first obstacle to using ancestral genetic traits, such as increased resistance to salinity or heat, is to have access to those wild versions .

There are genetic seed banks, such as the Kew Millenium Seed Bank, which collects and stores in England grains of about 40.00 0 species of wild plants .

“ But all wild species are not represented “, comments Benjamin Kilian. So specialized botanists are needed, for a long and expensive task.

Between 2013 and 2018 Crop Trust collected more than 4,600 samples of 371 wild varieties out of 28 priority crops (rice, wheat, sweet potato, banana, apples …).

( Interested in: The Earth follows a “catastrophic” course towards increasing its temperature by 2.7 ºC )

Aaron Davis and his colleagues found a wild species of coffee in Sierra Leone , better than robusta and more resistant to heating than subtle arabica.

“If we had gone there ten years later, it would probably have become extinct,” he estimates. “ Of the 124 known species of coffee, 60% are threatened with extinction “.

The coffee plantations are not the only ones affected. For example, in four Central American countries, the cradle of numerous crops, 70 wild species of plants essential for food, such as corn, potatoes, avocados or squash, are threatened with extinction, that is, 35% of the plants analyzed, according to a recent study .

Specialists fear being too late. And furthermore, once found and collected, the work is not finished.

The varieties are not necessarily ready for large-scale farming.

So you have to experiment with new varieties. And “that can take 10, 15, 20 years” if genetic engineering is not used, Benjamin Killian warns. In the case of potatoes, developing a new variety can take up to 100 years.