Improving wheat and ‘life’ for Egyptian farmers
The word for ‘bread’ in Egyptian Arabic (aish) literally means ‘life’, a crucial and loved staple that has been a central part of Egypt’s ancient story. Today, NISD is collaborating with Egyptian researchers to understand the threats Egyptian wheat farming faces today, and how we can develop varieties to best meet diverse users’ needs.
Walk through the Tomb of Ty in Saqqara and you will find hieroglyphics of wheat harvests from 2345 BCE, but carbon dating of grains has dated cultivation back to 5,200 BCE. Today, wheat and its products line the cities of Egypt as an essential and loved staple.
Egyptians eat a lot of wheat. The average Egyptian consumes between 180–200 kg of wheat per year, over double the global average of around 67 kg/year. To feed this demand, Egypt imports around 40% of its wheat consumption, around 14 million tonnes, making it one of the world’s largest wheat importers.
Egypt’s dependence on imports brings significant economic costs of around $2bn annually, and risks to food security from price spikes or trade disruptions. Price spikes around these commodities can also catalyse wider civil unrest. Increasing Egypt’s self-sufficiency for wheat could therefore reduce dependence on trade prices, reduce government spending and improve the overall resilience of the country.
Egypt’s wheat production today however cannot meet its demand, and this is partly due to productivity challenges. This is why NISD is working as part of the UK-CGIAR Science Centre to increase wheat productivity in Egypt and make more nutritious flour for improved national resilience and nutritional security.
The UK-CGIAR wheat project is particularly focused on two traits to improve in wheat: rust resilience and high-iron content. Ask an Egyptian farmer what the main growing pressure is for wheat and they will likely say fungal rusts. These diseases weaken plants and diminish harvests, impacting both livelihoods and food security across the country. The best way to prevent losses to rusts is to breed plants with innate resistance, removing the need to repeatedly spray expensive fungicides that affect local biodiversity. Providing rust resistant varieties could therefore improve the resilience of harvests, while also reducing input cost and environmental impacts.
Iron deficiency also remains challenge in Egypt, with around 40% of the population experiencing anemia, which particularly affects women and children. While wheat is comparatively low in iron, the quantity of wheat products Egyptians consume make it a major iron source. Raising the iron content of wheat could therefore improve iron nutrition across diverse uses, without the need for dietary change.
But just as we all want different things from ‘life’, so might different Egyptian users want different things from their bread and wheat crops beyond these two focus traits. For instance, men and women might have diverse needs for how they access, grow, process and sell wheat crops. That is why the NISD is working with farmers to understand how these preferred traits differ by gender and farm size, so that we can set inclusive, gender-responsive breeding targets to support diverse farmers.
As part of this research, NISD has been working with the Egyptian Agricultural Research Center (ARC) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) to engage diverse farmers in participatory activities to inform wheat improvement. These include having farmers setting their own criteria by how they identify useful wheat varieties and using these farmer-chosen targets as a framework through which to review promising ARC varieties.
Reviewing wheat varieties in this way helps combine the bioscience understanding of wheat biology, with a context and culturally informed lens of local needs. The result is a combined approach to inform how to bundle rust resistance and iron content in locally preferred traits and varieties, increasing how well suited the resulting varieties are for farmers and raising the likelihood of adoption.
Speaking with farmers also allows us to confirm their interest in the two target traits, as well as understanding wider pressures on wheat farmers. Rust resilience was repeatedly confirmed as something farmers need and participants welcomed the idea of more nutritious wheat in the future.
These international collaborations not only help Egypt but also helps inform wheat resilience in other countries. Rust is not a threat to UK wheat harvests under current climates, but this could change as growing seasons shift, becoming hotter and wetter and indeed the first infections were sighted in 2018. By developing new resilient varieties for Egypt, we can use these varieties and our increased understanding of the disease to breed resistant crops in the UK and elsewhere.
Thank you to ICARDA, ARC and John Innes Centre for supporting this fieldwork, and the ongoing collaboration. The next participatory varietal selection activities will be with the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) in July.
The UK-CGIAR Centre is managed by the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) and funded by Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
Posted originally on NISD.