Pacific islands join US climate-resilient crops initiative

The Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, or VACS, is expanding to a new part of the world: the Pacific islands. Led by the U.S. State Department, the initiative has focused on building resilient food systems through healthy soils and climate-resilient crops. It was first launched in Africa last February, followed by an expansion to Guatemala in March. Now, the Pacific islands have been brought into the fold, backed by a $2.6 million investment from the United States and Australia. “Through the Pacific Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (PACS), we will work with communities, farmers, non-government organizations and the private sector, and will draw upon the knowledge of research institutions, international institutions, and governments,” said Cary Fowler, the State Department’s Special Envoy for Global Food Security, in a social media post on Wednesday. The project’s lead implementer is The Pacific Community, a development organization governed by the region’s 22 countries and the group’s five founding members: Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Pacific Community has been around for nearly eight decades — but food systems have increasingly become a key focus of the organization. “We just recognize that we get the worst of the food system in many ways,” said Karen Mapusua, the director of the organization’s land resources division. “We’re suffering because of the climate impacts, and we also have incredibly big problems with noncommunicable diseases, with our obesity, heart disease, and diabetes rates amongst the highest in the world. These are not the gold medals you want to be winning, but they're the ones that we are winning at the moment.” Over the last 20 years, Mapusua explained, The Pacific Community had built its own gene bank, a facility that can store and preserve plant genetic material. Today, that gene bank holds over 2,000 distinct samples of crop and tree varieties. The organization has also spearheaded programs to study traditional crops and growing techniques across the region, something Mapusua hopes they can take forward more fully with the expansion of VACS. To do that, The Pacific Community has developed a regional research agenda to pinpoint the highest priorities and assembled technical networks to drive such work forward. “We’ve got a good idea of what the climate change impacts are likely to do to our crops as far as production: We know we have to prepare for more salt in the soil, and we know we have to prepare for longer drought periods,” Mapusua told Devex. “But we don’t know what the change in climate is going to do to the nutritional value of our crops, so there’s a big gap there.” New Zealand will also be contributing to PACS through a set of “complementary agricultural investments,” the State Department said in a statement, and all three countries will coordinate with partners in the Pacific to share information on land management practices, nutritious crop varieties, and methods of boosting climate resiliency. One way that might play out is through bananas. “If we go from the North Pacific to Micronesia, there are over 50 cultivars of bananas, many of which are starting to disappear,” Mapusua told Devex. She mentioned the benefits of several types, with one variety more tolerant to a disease spreading across part of the region, and another particularly high in vitamin A, a nutrient deficient in many Pacific Islanders. “If we’re able to investigate these bananas a little more, understand them a little more, and find ways to re-introduce them into the market and into diets, we can diversify our banana production and work toward solving nutritional problems.” But in order to do so, a whole-of-systems approach was needed, she said — one that looks at not just the crop varieties themselves, but the soils and climate around them. That’s the approach VACS has tried to differentiate itself with, digging into traditional crops to better understand how they will cope with a changing climate. That focus has yet to touch traditional crops from the Pacific, such as the far-reaching breadfruit tree. Better understanding these crops, Mapusua said, might end up benefiting the rest of the world — especially because in many cases, the low-lying Pacific islands have been hit by the worst effects of climate change first. “We depend on [breadfruit] through all sorts of disasters, as it’s easy to ferment and save long-term,” she explained. “It’s a tree that could be valuable across the world to support food security, but we need to understand it more.”