Crops are already seeing losses from heat and drought. Can genetic diversity – a return to foods’ origins – help combat the climate challenges ahead?
The industrialization of agriculture in the last century boosted production around the world – but that success also made our food systems much more vulnerable to the growing climate crisis.
Maize or corn is now grown in greater volume than any crop in history, and is still the staple food for about 1.2 billion people in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Composite: Guardian graphic. Source: Corn Genetics: The History of Maize by Sherry Flint-Garcia, USDA. The worst-case scenario is the RCP8.5 pathway, the intermediate scenarios are RCP6.0 to RCP4.5 and the best-case scenario is RCP2.6.
But around 40 years ago something else started happening: from country to country, the overlap in our diets started to grow.