Scotland can lead way in global food security plan

Scotland looks set to play an important role in encouraging better international co-operation aimed at ensuring future world-wide food security.

Proposing a much more open attitude to developing not only new crops but new crop and growing systems, a group of leading international scientists – including the SRUC’S principal and chief executive, Professor Wayne Powell – have called on both scientific communities and commercial organisations to make the findings of their research more readily available to others working in the same field.

“For Scotland and the UK to make its rightful contribution to such important global initiatives we must become better at sharing resources through a commitment to open science,” said Powell who coauthored a keynote paper in the internationally renowned journal Science.

Outlining the role which a global crop improvement network (GCIN) could play in enhancing crop research around the globe – and feeding a growing global population against a backdrop of global warming – the paper proposed building on some of the work which provided the impetus for the green revolution of the nineteen sixties – by taking a worldwide approach to crop research.

“SRUC and the other Scottish research institutes are major producers and curators of long-term experimental and observational data, meaning we are ideally positioned to generate new knowledge of benefit to tackling national and global food production issues,” said Powell

“Encompassing most staple food crops, the GCIN would revolutionise our ability to understand crop performance in different environments and speed up the adoption of vital technologies.”

He said it would achieve this by providing access to well-controlled “field laboratories”, which would be essential for testing out scientific breakthroughs aimed at improving crop yields in practical, real world situations. A system already in operation for wheat currently allowed new, disease resistant varieties to be tested at 700 sites in over 90 countries.

Harmonising international research practices and sharing data would allow the Network to work with existing national crop research systems – and could be supported through public-private partnerships, said Powell.