Humanity Cannot Survive Without Resilient Agriculture

Today, there are more threats to agricultural production than ever. If these threats are not properly prioritized at the national and global levels, the world risks agricultural collapse.

Despite the enormous success of revolutionized agricultural production in the twentieth century, increasing demands from growing, urbanizing, and food-insecure populations are testing vulnerable agricultural systems.

Agriculture now finds itself in a race to adapt to and overcome an increasingly hostile biological and environmental threat landscape.

I. Biological Threats

For farmers, existing and emergent diseases and pests are a constant hazard to their harvests. For the world, biological threats result in disrupted agricultural markets, unsafe foods, rising hunger, and a looming potential for global crop pandemics.

The agricultural losses sustained by outbreaks of plant diseases and pests range from 17 percent of annual global yields for potatoes to 30 percent for rice, amounting to nearly $300 billion in lost production.

II. Environmental Threats

Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, increasing pollution, and extreme weather events like drought, flood, and wildfire all reduce crop yields.

The economic impact of agricultural losses caused by environmental disasters is stark. Between 2008 and 2018, disasters cost more than $100 billion in agricultural losses across Africa, Latin America, and Asia alone. And environmental changes are predicted to reduce suitable croplands for more than 50 percent of all crops globally, indicating reductions in crop yields and nutrition.

While biological and environmental stressors pose existential risks to agriculture around the world, food security and human security depend on resilient agriculture systems.

“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

Today, however, two and a half billion people around the world are not food secure.

The world’s population will approach 10 billion people in the latter half of this century. As the global population grows—in size and wealth—the world’s food demand will increase by as much as 56 percent by 2050.

Current systems of agriculture are ill-equipped to meet this demand. Should the external stressors that threaten agriculture overwhelm production, the results would be catastrophic hunger, while food insecurity will continue to contribute to social and political instability. Diversity in agriculture is an essential element of defense against this future.

Securing the Future of Agriculture Through Genebanks

Food security cannot exist without agricultural biodiversity.

Biodiversity is the foundation of agriculture. Diverse genes and species of plants are essential for developing more nutritious, robust, and resistant varieties of crops. This improves not just food security for people worldwide, but the economic security of farmers, regions, and countries around the world.

However, decades of consolidation across the food system have eroded agricultural biodiversity, or agrobiodiversity, more quickly than at any time in human history.

This decline in biodiversity deprives agriculture of the diverse genetic resources needed to build resilience to threats and also forestall future losses.

Agrobiodiversity loss weakens farmers’ ability to react to external hazards, while robbing them of the genes that could confer new resilience. It is here that genebanks play a vital role.

National and international genebanks and seed banks provide the infrastructure and expertise to fight back against the many forms of agricultural annihilation. They collect, manage, preserve, and distribute the fundamental raw materials of plant life.

Researchers, crop breeders, and farmers use these plant genetic materials to study overlooked varieties and search for unidentified genes that can fend off biological threats and overcome environmental degradation. In this way, genebanks offer resilience and opportunity to the entire agricultural industry.

Globally, there are more than 1,750 genebanks across national, regional, and international levels, which collectively preserve 7.4 million crop and plant accessions (samples). Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located in the Norwegian Arctic, serves the ultimate safeguard for this biodiversity, conserving 1.33 million samples of plant genetic materials shared across the worldwide genebank network.

The agrobiodiversity stored in these genebanks is being used to mitigate threats facing several of the world’s most important crops.

The Threat Landscape:
Critical Applications of Biodiversity

Click on a crop to learn about the threats it faces and how the global agricultural community is innovating to protect it through agrobiodiversity.

Cultivating Biodiversity in the Field and in the Lab

The conservation of agrobiodiversity is essential not only to agricultural production, but the livelihoods of nearly 3.8 billion people who rely on agriculture for their incomes.

Producing enough food for the future in a sustainable way requires novel tools that allow farmers to grow more, healthier crops with fewer environmental impacts that threaten their next harvests. Here, agrobiodiversity offers both resilience and opportunity for the farmers, consumers, and economies of the world.

Agrobiodiversity enables the development of new, high-quality crop varieties, and generates better yields and better nutrition—while requiring fewer inputs.

Agrobiodiversity is not just an environmental characteristic to be protected, but a strategic asset to be employed on the farms and in the labs. From it, farmers and researchers are developing the crops that will safeguard a future where uncertainty is certain.

The following recommendations offer a path to secure this future:

In addition to biofortified varieties, so-called “opportunity crops”—those often lesser-known, but nutritionally dense and locally adapted plants—offer economic advantage for farmers and nutrition security for local communities. Frameworks like the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils developed at the U.S. Department of State demonstrate policies that center agrobiodiversity within global development strategies.

Protecting and enabling the use of biodiverse natural resources can help reduce malnutrition and help farmers adapt and flourish.

Conclusion

There is one industry that feeds all 8 billion people on this planet: agriculture. Yet, the threat of agricultural collapse is not adequately appreciated as a threat to global security. And the need to bolster agriculture against the coming challenges is more urgent than ever.

Navigating a landscape of emerging risks, while ensuring the world’s food supply, requires reevaluating agrobiodiversity for its strategic importance in safeguarding the food and economic security of all nations. These growing challenges necessitate reframing the scope and scale of risk, as well as the identification of strategies that leverage biodiversity to enhance resilience.

The ultimate defense for agriculture’s emerging threat landscape lies in the plant genetic resources developed across millions of years of evolutionary history and millennia of agricultural practice.

National and international networks of genebanks stand as living libraries to store and study these resources. We must protect agrobiodiversity to support existing agricultural production and critical breeding efforts for the uncertain future we know will come.

This report is made possible by the generous support of the
Global Crop Diversity Trust (The Crop Trust).