The grounds at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA).

Credit: Fiona MacDonald

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In the midst of a red, rocky stretch of land in the northeast of Syria, hundreds of rows of wheat brace themselves against a hot, dry wind. The plants are separated into small square plots by grassy pathways, ensuring no genetic material is transferred between sets.

At first glance, the dry, yellow crops look identical – they’re the only signs of life for kilometres around. But, in fact, they couldn’t be more different.

Some have grown tall and straight, while others are too wild and ‘hairy’. Some haven’t yet produced seeds, while others are ready to be harvested. Many couldn’t take the heat while a few thrived.

And these differences will determine what many populations will be eating in the next 10 to 20 years, and could decide how many people go hungry as Earth’s population grows.

“We’re looking for the crops that show both heat resistance and high yield,” says Francis Ogbonnaya, a wheat breeder with the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), 30 km south of Aleppo, Syria.

While each plot is genetically different, all of the crops are the result of an arranged marriage between a wild Syrian wheat-relative (which exhibits heat resistance) and a domestic wheat crop from Sudan – a country that loses millions of dollars in crop yield annually due to extreme heat.

When it comes to finding plants that can handle the heat, Ogbonnaya is in the right place. Temperatures in Aleppo exceeded 40˚C almost every day during the 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer. Sometimes, it edged above 46˚C.

Those accustomed to rigorous lab controls may wonder how parameters can be controlled in such a wild environment: what if there’s a cold snap?

“That is one thing we never have to worry about here,” laughs Ogbonnaya, who formerly worked in Australia and continues to collaborate with Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to develop wheat strains suited to the harsh climate.

In the middle of the Arabian desert, it’s not just heat resistance that scientists are searching for: here the crops that will help civilisation survive on a rapidly changing planet are being put to the test.

Researchers have come from all over the world to create crops for the future: wheat that is resistant to drought and salinity, chickpeas that repel fungus and crops with significantly higher yields.

Genetically superior plants couldn’t come sooner – a perfect storm of obstacles is bearing down upon farmers, says Kenneth Street, an Australian agriculturalist and genetic resource scientist at ICARDA. The world’s population continues to grow rapidly, and is estimated that it could hit 10 billion by 2050. And as it is, we can’t feed the mouths we have: in 2010, almost one in seven people on the planet were malnourished.

The problem is not only that we have more mouths to feed, but the fact that everything we need to grow food – water, land, fertiliser – is running out at an alarming rate, stresses Street.

According to the United Nations, the world needs to double its output of food by 2050 in order to avoid global mass starvation; other estimates suggest a four-fold yield boost is needed. But – in line with his brazen and honest nature – Street warns that, the way things are looking now, we’ll be lucky to maintain our current rate of production.

“There’s climate change, our phosphorous is running out, most of the world’s water basins are being sucked dry – those are the three big ones. Then we’ve got competition between biofuels, as well as the problem that modern agriculture is heavily reliant upon fossil fuels – the U.S. alone uses one trillion litres of oil a year to make nitrogen fertiliser. What happens when the oil runs out? We’re also losing something like six billion hectares a year to land degradation, so you add all those things up and it’s scary.”

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