Climate change will have a huge impact on the seed industry

Agriculture is extremely sensitive to climate and weather conditions. If the impact of climate change on crops and the responses crops make could be better understood, the ability of crop production systems to adapt to climate change could be greatly improved.

Some countries in Asia and Africa have lost about 280 million tons of potential grain output because of climate change factors, among which rising temperatures and prolonged droughts are the most important risk factors. In developing countries in Asia, this negative impact is most obvious, and agricultural production in these countries is expected to decline by 4% to 10%, depending specifically on the socioeconomic background and climate change conditions of different countries. Rising temperatures will reduce the fertility of cultivated land, and it is estimated that by 2050, maize yields will fall by about 6% to 23%, while wheat yields will fall by 40% to 45%. The food supply mainly comes from the consumption of the seeds of food crops (including wheat, rice, maize, soybean, barley and sorghum), and seeds are also the most vulnerable to climate change. The growth rate of food production is lower than the growth rate of population, so if the yields of food crops are insufficient, food security will naturally be challenged.

Another important impact of climate change is that the cultivated area of rainfed crops accounts for 60% of farmland area. It is predicted that South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa will suffer severely from the impact of climate change. If high-yielding stress-resistant varieties are used more widely, while water and nutrient inputs are increased in an integrated way, crop yields can still be increased. Climate change will affect food security, mainly in four aspects: edibility, availability, supply stability and food utilization. Seeds will play an important role in food production, so high-yielding stress-resistant varieties should be provided at the right time and in the right place. In addition, climate change will also affect pests and diseases, such as causing the emergence of new pests and diseases, affecting the development of insect pests and diseases, and the position of new pest races within the entire population ecology.

⟦NL> The production of high-quality seeds is also affected by the interactions between food crops — weeds, which will lead to the loss of pollinator biodiversity and genetic diversity. Climate change will simultaneously alter the phenology, reproduction, flowering, pollen viability, pollination and fertilization, seed filling time, seed setting, seed size, seed dormancy status, seed yield and many other factors of food crops, and the final result is that seed growth is severely affected. At the same time, the cost of seed production is very likely to increase, because continuous climate change will affect the management of land and water resources, the application of herbicides and insecticides, the management of harvesting and the scheduling of seed management, etc. Seed-related intellectual property rights (IPR), including infringement of patent rights, the prevalence of monoculture, acquisitions and mergers by multinational companies, and the loss of biodiversity and pollination, will be further complicated. Another point that needs attention is that there is still a lack of interdisciplinary cooperation among traditional crop breeding and domestication, crop physiologists and seed technologists, agronomists and biologists. Furthermore, compared with conventional breeding that has no yield advantage, obtaining high-yielding crops and seeds means increasing the cost of genetic engineering breeding and increasing the amount of herbicide application, which is to say that climate change will lead to a decline in the net agricultural income of developed countries.