The father of India’s green revolution, M.S. Swaminathan, once famously said: “If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.”
A blistering heatwave and patchy monsoon rains in Asia have reinforced this claim, as food prices remained stubbornly high for months due to inclement weather and supply shocks from the Russia-Ukraine war.
Millions of tonnes of unharvested rice have also been affected by unusually heavy rain in central China’s Henan province [recently].
For the second year in a row the region is experiencing extreme weather, which shows climate change is happening here and now.
Gene editing, a technique that makes it possible to alter crops without introducing new genes, can also be used to help them withstand climate stress, said Shivendra Bajaj, a technical adviser at Asia-Pacific Seed Alliance, an organisation with more than 500 member companies in the region.
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“There is no magic wand. No technique alone can give you the solution you are looking for,” he said. “If you keep on stacking everything, incremental changes will follow.”
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The power of digital technology can only be fully realised when governments work together to plan for water sharing, encourage farmers to switch to less resource-intensive crops, and save areas affected by natural disasters.
