Climate Change and Food Security in the Pacific islands

1. Climate Change and Food Security in the Pacific islands Andrew McGregorKoko Siga Fiji

2. Impact of future climate extremes on Pacific island agriculture • Extreme climatic events will threaten the food security and economic wellbeing of rural households • Major negative impacts on already fragile economies • Risk management: important that Pacific islands farmers be given the best opportunity to be able to adapt to these extremes.

3. Range of adaption strategies and coping mechanisms requiring government and donor support • Enhancing the resilience of traditional cropping systems • Promoting appropriate traditional planting material preservation • Developing improved germplasm for traditional crops that are better suited to climatic extremes and associated pest and disease problems. • Ensuring that secure and effective planting material production systems (community, national and regional) are in place

4. The vulnerability of traditional Pacific island crops • Despite the strength of traditional Pacific island crops and cropping systems in dealing with risk and disasters, there is anunderlying vulnerability due to the narrow genetic base of these crops • Most of the taro grown across the Pacific originated in Melanesia - this makes these root crops particularly susceptible to the impact of diseases (e.g. taro leaf blight)

5. Two case studies • Utilisingregional and national germplasm collections as a climate change adaptation strategy: the case study of taro leaf blight in Samoa • Broadening the genetic base of root crops in Vanuatu: a proactive climate change adaptation strategy

6. Premise of the study By enabling farmers to adapt to climate extremes in the medium term, future generations of farmers will be better placed to adapt to climate change

7. Different approaches to conservation/crop improvement + disaster management • Samoa study demonstrates how crop conservation utilising regional genebankcoupled with an in-country breeding and distribution program provides abasis for an effective response to a biological disaster • Vanuatu study demonstrates a proactive approach where crop conservation, (ex situ and in situ) is used to enhance the diversity of the gene pool -providing the farmers with ‘genetic insurance’ to manage climatic variability and future biological disasters

8. Case studies clearly show the substantial benefits of crop germplasm conservation • Samoa - large quantifiable economic benefits that far outweigh costs + other significant benefits • Vanuatu - benefits yet to be realised thus more difficult to quantify

9. Key findings • Need for farmers to have access to genetic diversity and systems by which diversity can be used + evaluated = provides farmers with a range of optionsto deal with the variables of climate change • Providing diversity isnota one-off solution – the nature of climate change demands ongoing existence regional germplasmcentre operating as a hub. This requires substantial long term funding

10. Identified projects requiring substantial support • Replicating of the Samoa taro breeding program in Fiji - the arrival of TLB is seen as inevitable • Scaling up of the Vanuatu pilot ‘in-situ’ conservation project • Replicating the Vanuatu project in other Melanesian countries