Feeding the World - Part Two

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

As the world’s population grows and the climate challenges our ability to grow crops, how can agriculture provide enough food? Can we get more from our current food crops for less?

Scientists and farmers alike have been increasingly haunted by the environmental effects of high-intensity farming over the last half century. There is now an urgent need to be more mindful of the landscape and our finite ecological resources.

Professor Kathy Willis, science director of Kew Gardens, looks at how we can breed better-adapted and more efficient crops. Rice is a staple food for more than half the world’s population. To maintain this in the face of population growth and land-loss to urbanisation, rice yields will have to increase by over 50% by 2050. Kathy Willis examines an ambitious plan to turbocharge photosynthesis in rice – improving the way it captures sunlight, to produce sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide and water in hotter dryer climates.

New technology to imaging plant roots below ground is also having a profound impact on plant root architecture that breeding programmes hope to capitalise on in order to improve any crop’s ability to forage for water and nutrients. But can we achieve the necessary varieties in time? Should we re-evaluate some of the highly resilient crops we have tended to undervalue such as sorghum and cassava?

(Photo: Farm workers harvesting rice. Credit: Nick Wood)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts. 50 there will be 9.5 billion people walking the earth. How will we grow enough food to feed
0:26.2	them all? One thing is certain. We need to dramatically improve the resilience and output
0:32.3	of our agricultural crops.
0:34.0	I'm Kathy Willis and this is Discovery.
0:38.0	We have eight greenhouse facilities here.
0:42.0	You can control temperature, you can control
0:44.9	humidity, we can also inject gases like carbon dioxide to do our climate change
0:50.8	studies. A new state-of-the-art facility has just opened at the
0:54.6	Institute of Rice Research in the Philippines. Its aim is to improve our
0:59.3	understanding of the effects of climate change on many of our staple crops and to develop more resilient
1:04.9	varieties.
1:06.6	It's the latest step in the never-ending search to secure our future food.
1:11.2	The Institute's lead scientist is Abd al-ishmal.
1:15.0	We can also change the temperature from cooler to hotter to see the responses of varieties and
1:20.0	help us in breathing materials that can, for example, survive high temperature during
1:24.1	the day or during the night.
1:25.9	Some places, temperature is too high, but these are very small areas now.
1:29.6	Say if you look into Pakistan or some places in South Iran, temperature for rice is very high.
1:36.0	These are good places to test some of this material that can actually withstand temperature if it reach that level.
1:43.6	Research like this is an integral part of what's come to be called the second green
	...

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