Egypt Uses ‘Smart Crops’ to Mitigate Effects of Climate Change

Date: 03 September 2022 - 21:28

News ID: ۱۰۶۴۷۲

CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – The past few years have been especially daunting for Abul Mahasen Mohamed, a farmer from the Nile Delta province of Menoufiya.
High temperatures, water scarcity and rising salinity in the soil deprived him and fellow farmers of sizeable crop yields.
“Some people sustained huge losses,” Mohamed told Middle East Eye. “Extreme heat burned some crops and devastated some farms.”
This year, Mohamed is growing a new maize variety that holds out against extreme weather conditions.
This variety needs a fraction of the amount of water needed by traditional crops for irrigation.
He is joining the national march towards climate-smart crops, plants that can offer a defence against the impacts of climatic change.
In doing so, Egypt, one of the countries hardest hit by climate change, is seeking to mitigate the effects from rising temperatures on its food security and agriculture sector, which employs 21 percent of the national work force and contributes around 11.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Local agricultural research centers have recently unveiled crop varieties that can bear up against high temperatures.
These varieties include a new rice type that can adapt to extreme weather conditions and high salinity in the soil.
The same variety only needs a small amount of water for irrigation, researchers say.
“The development of the new rice variety is part of a larger plan for expanding the cultivation of climate-smart crops and legumes,” Hamdi Muwafi, the head Egypt’s National Project for the Development of Rice, told MEE. “We work hard to change the makeup of the crops so that they can cope with the changes global warming is causing.”
In 2008, the government imposed a ban on rice exports to preserve stocks for the domestic market and save water.
Egypt produced 4.5 million tons of rice in 2021/2022, down from 6 million tons in 2020/2021, according to the Grains Chamber at the Federation of Industries. In 2022, the cultivation of rice was allowed in nine provinces, five of which are located in the Nile Delta.
Most of the country’s rice farms are located in the Nile Delta, which stands in the epicenter of the impact of climate change.
The global warming-induced rise in the sea level here is expected to inundate large swathes of the delta, increasing salinity in its soil and displacing millions of people.
However, together with other climate-resilient crops, the new rice variety promises to alleviate some of the effects of climate change and provide much needed food for Egypt’s more than 100 million people.
Around 300,000 acres of farmland have already been cultivated with the new variety, which makes up almost 30 percent of the country’s rice-growing farmland, according to Muwafi.