Adapting Crops to Climate Changes by Evolutionary-Participatory Plant Breeding

Climate change affects food security and agricultural production. Quantitative prediction of temperature increases and rainfall decreases are still very imprecise; therefore, adaptation to climate change is still an ill-defined breeding objective and likely to be different from place to place even for the same crop.

The need for adaptation seems to be at odds with the tendency towards uniformity of modern plant breeding and the consequent decrease of agro biodiversity. A suite of traits are known to play an important role in the adaptation of crops to high temperature and drought. However, despite our ability to manipulate them through genomic selection, because of the uncertainty of what exactly to breed for, the emphasis should not be so much on which trait to breed for, but rather to adopt a breeding strategy that allows a highly dynamic and efficient system of variety deployment in farmers’ fields.

Evolutionary plant breeding exploits the evolutionary potential of crops, given that enough genetic diversity is available, and, combined with beneficial effects of farmers’ participation will have beneficial effects on variety deployment and agro biodiversity. The paper reviews the theory of evolutionary plant breeding and provide examples of its application mostly for organic agriculture. The combination of evolutionary plant breeding and of organic agriculture may represent a combination of the mitigation effects of climate change of the latter with the adaptation effects of the former.