14/09/2010

Cordoba (Spain) - The Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Dr Shakeel Bhatti has participated today in the International Seminar on the role of role of agricultural biodiversity in helping to ensure global food security in the context of climate change, organized by the University of Cordoba, in Spain.

The seminar is one of the major events convened in Spain to celebrate the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity and to highlight the importance of international cooperation for its conservation and sustainable use. The three-day event relies on the participation of national and international speakers. It is expected that a declaration will be issued at the end of the event, which will be transmitted to the High-Level Meeting of the United Nations Assembly on 22 September in New York.

The Secretary of State for International Cooperation Soraya Rodríguez Ramos said during the opening of the Seminar that "Spain considers the International Treaty as a key tool in the fight against hunger. We support the Treaty because it promotes sustainable and equitable sharing of crop genetic diversity and supports small farmers, real custodians of agricultural biodiversity. Our investment of 2.2 USD million dollars in 2009 to Benefit-sharing Fund has attracted new funding for the Fund, which has received contributions worth 14 million dollars".

Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, said today while addressing the participants of the Seminar that science has established that climate change “is real and in progress” and that it “poses additional severe risks to food security and the agriculture sector, particularly for smallholder farmers in developing countries”.

Modibo Traoré, Assistant Director-General and Head of the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department of FAO, said that nowadays “biodiversity is also affected and threatened by other factors like urbanization, deforestation, pollution and conversion of wetlands”.

By 2050 the world’s population is expected to increase by 34 % compared to current levels and most of the increase will occur in developing countries. “The task ahead is to produce food while maintaining or improving the environment, at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels”, explained Traoré to the participants of the Seminar.

Emile Frison, Director General of Bioversity International, stressed that agricultural biodiversity is a vital and underappreciated aspect of biodiversity. "It isn't just a matter of breeding better crop varieties or breeds of livestock. Agricultural biodiversity is the foundation of a nutritious diet and offers the most sustainable solutions to problems of hunger and malnutrition. It is also vital for food security, by making farms more resilient and by enabling them to adapt to climate change. We really need to remember that without a food secure future, which depends absolutely on agricultural biodiversity, we won't be able to appreciate the rest of biodiversity”.

The importance of Agricultural Biodiversity for Spain

The Seminar aims at highlighting the importance of seeds for agriculture and human life in general. 75% of the world's population that goes hungry live in rural areas yet only 4% of overseas development assistance goes to agriculture, and a much smaller percentage to plant genetic resources, as it was mentioned in the first interventions of the day.

The dependence of the Spanish agriculture on the agrobiodiversity which has originated and diversified elsewhere is over 80% and “the international collaboration is important because many countries that are poor from an economic point of view are rich in genes and genetic diversity that are necessary for the survival of humanity. International cooperation on this matter is therefore not an option but a need”, said Bhatti.

Over the last hundred years a tremendous loss of genetic diversity has occurred within the so-called "major food species". Hundreds of thousands of heterogeneous varieties of crop plants cultivated over generations have been replaced by a small number of modern commercial varieties that are highly uniform and sometimes vulnerable. Over the last 100 years genetic erosion has grown, and nowadays no country is self-sufficient: the average country interdependence for the major crops is 70%, according to a technical study commissioned by FAO.