A sweltering heat wave decimated Pritam Singh’s wheat crop in 2022.
That year, temperatures reached a record-breaking 127 degrees Fahrenheit in Haryana, India, where Singh operates a 35-acre farm. The scorching heat shriveled the wheat and forced it to mature faster, he recalled, leading to just half of his usual harvest. Across India, the heat wave caused wheat production to plummet by 3 million metric tons ….
But two years later, even though temperatures were the highest they’d been in more than a decade, Singh was much more optimistic …. That’s because the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, known by its Spanish initials CIMMYT, had worked with local partner organizations to distribute cost-free buckets of climate-resilient seeds to Singh and millions of farmers like him across the country.
The organization was founded by Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize-winning agronomist whose work launched the so-called Green Revolution, which dramatically increased crop yields around the world.
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Since 2011, the organization has turned toward developing maize and wheat strains that can withstand the erratic weather and higher temperatures unleashed by climate change.
