The “Green Revolution” (GR) of the 1960s and 1970s allowed huge increases in crop yields and food production by developing new, improved varieties of our major crops. However, the GR also had long-term negative effects as those cultivars require high inputs and intensive production practices, which cause detrimental environmental impacts and are not sustainable. The GR has also led to an intense “genetic erosion”, with thousands of minor varieties lost forever or cultivated at a low scale. This low agrodiversity reduces the opportunities to find new sources of variation to fight new challenges, such as the current climate emergency.
Our modern high-yielding crop varieties are generally sensitive to abiotic stress, especially drought and soil salinity. Therefore, climate change effects – including more intense, longer and more frequent drought periods and other extreme weather phenomena, as well as accelerated soil salinisation – represent the most critical threat to food security worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, one of the most affected regions.
To fight climate change effects in the Mediterranean, commercial cultivation of stress-tolerant crops domesticated and grown elsewhere represents a complementary approach to the biotechnological improvement of abiotic stress tolerance of our conventional GR-derived crops or the domestication of stress-tolerant wild species (halophytes, xerophytes). Apart from enhanced stress tolerance, the selection of these “new”, alternative crops should consider Mediterranean environmental conditions, soil properties, fertilisation needs, market access and other parameters to make their cultivation profitable for the farmers. In addition, they should help fulfil the EU “Green Deal” objectives, such as reduced agrochemical inputs (chemical fertilisers, pesticides), reduced tillage, adaptation to organic agriculture, healthier food or multiple uses of the harvested products.
This communication will present and discuss the properties and advantages of some candidate crops fulfilling the conditions mentioned above, such as quinoa, teff, tritordeum, camelina, chia and sweet potato.
