MED-Amin network

Deux nouvelles maladies fongiques du blé, des moisissures virulentes capables d'anéantir des récoltes entières, ont été détectées dans le monde en 2016, menaçant surtout le pourtour méditerranéen et l'équilibre alimentaire déjà précaire de certaines régions, s'est alarmée la FAO vendredi.

Un nouveau type de rouille du blé, baptisé TTTTF ou rouille noire, a été découvert en Sicile sur plusieurs milliers d'hectares de blé dur, celui qui sert à faire les pâtes, a indiqué l'Agence des Nations unies pour l'alimentation, FAO, dans un communiqué. Selon les scientifiques, sans un contrôle minutieux, cette race pourrait se répandre sur de grandes étendues le long du bassin méditerranéen et de la côte adriatique. Le deuxième type de champignon menaçant le blé est une rouille jaune, pour l'instant sans nom, qui a été découverte l'an dernier en Italie, au Maroc et dans quatre pays scandinaves. Les analyses préliminaires suggèrent que cette nouvelle race est liée à une famille de souches agressives, alors que la rouille jaune avait jusqu'à présent été considérée comme un problème mineur au Maroc et en Sicile.

Au même moment, les producteurs de blé en Ethiopie et en Ouzbékistan luttent contre un autre foyer de rouille jaune, baptisé AF2012, qui a porté un coup dur à la production de blé éthiopienne en 2016. L'AF2012 avait d'abord été signalé en Afghanistan avant de se manifester l'an dernier dans les pays de la Corne de l'Afrique, où elle a affecté des milliers d'hectares de blé. « Nous devons agir rapidement et appréhender le problème de manière intégrale », a déclaré Fazil Dusuncelli, phytopathologiste à l'Agence des Nations unies pour l'agriculture et l'alimentation (FAO).

British farmers should gear up for the possibility of a hard Brexit, with subsidies likely to drop by 20% by 2020, land agency Strutt & Parker said.

 George Chichester, partner in Strutt & Parker's farm department, said farmers had two years to "get their house in order" ahead of Brexit, with the prospects of a "tougher five years" to follow.

Mr Chichester said that in the years following Brexit there was a danger that "subsidy support will be less and trade tariffs may well apply, and even if not, then our markets are at risk of being undermined by cheap imports from elsewhere in the world".

 Mr Chichester said it was likely that some form of subsidy support would remain, but it would probably be focused on environmental stewardship and accountable.

 Farmers should assume that the basic payment will fall by 20% by 2020 and is likely to continue to decline after that, he said.

Spain replaced Germany as the EU's top produce of animal feed producer in 2016, the Alltech Global Feed survey said, growing 8.0% year-on-year, as global feed production hits a record high of over 1bn tonnes.

Growth across the whole European region was slower, Alltech said, up 3.3%.

"Some of this slow growth can be attributed to the tumultuous year the European Union has seen with Brexit and the reform of agriculture subsidies".

And Alltech noted the fall in feed production within the European diary industry.

Rising global production

Alltech's survey showed global feed production up 3.7% as a whole, to 1.03bn tonnes.

The fastest growth was seen in Africa, up some 13%, and in the Middle East, where feed output grew by nearly 17%.

"Shining stars for the region include Nigeria, Algeria, Tunisia, Kenya and Zambia, all of which saw growth of at least 30%," Alltech said.

L’agriculture de précision est une méthode de gestion agricole visant à optimiser les rendements et les investissements, en cherchant à mieux tenir compte des variabilités des milieux et des conditions entre les différentes parcelles ainsi qu'à l’intérieur de chacune d'entre elles. Dans une tribune, Alcimed détaille de quelle manière l’imagerie satellite peut aider l’agriculture de précision. 

Le satellite est déjà largement utilisé en agriculture de précision, principalement pour des applications de navigation (suivi de position et pilotage des machines agricoles par GPS) ainsi que pour les prévisions météorologiques. Viennent aujourd’hui s’ajouter à ces pratiques les applications liées à l’imagerie qui utilisent des prises de vue dans des bandes spectrales spécifiques pour en déduire des paramètres physiques relatifs aux plantes.

L’application principale concerne la modulation, qui permet d’adapter les apports d’intrants selon la position du tracteur au sein d’une parcelle. Le principe consiste à prendre en compte l’hétérogénéité intra-parcellaire grâce aux images satellite pour pouvoir appliquer la bonne dose, au bon endroit, au bon moment.

THE Department of Agriculture (DA) is working with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in conducting a "food consumption quantification survey" to ensure food security in the next 50 years.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said this is to determine what kind of food Filipinos would like to eat and identify where to source it.
FAO, who will lead the study, is an organization geared towards eradicating hunger, ensuring food insecurity, fight malnutrition to totally eliminate poverty and promote sustainable management and utilization of natural resources.
“The country has a total land area of about 30 million hectares and it will never expand. It will never grow while our population continues to grow at about 2.9 percent per annum,” Piñol said.
He added the study is necessary as many projections showed that time will come the land and sea resources will not be able to feed the total population in a traditional manner.
The study, he said, would also determine the alternative food, which would best suit the public’s taste.
Piñol added that the move is pursuant to President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive which is to provide affordable and available food to all. (ASP)

Russia, fresh from a record grains harvest last year, is poised for a "good" crop of winter cereals in 2017 too, US officials said, flagging growing fertilizer use, besides a rise in plantings.

Russian farmers had - in sowing winter grains across an officially estimated 17.4m hectares for the 2017 harvest - beaten both the government target and year-ago area of 16.3m hectares, the US Department of Agriculture's Moscow bureau said.

The increase in area was down in part to "favourable weather and sowing conditions" during the planting window, the bureau said in a report.

However, it highlighted too "strong [domestic] grain prices" which had "supported grain producers' incomes".

"According to industry analysts, higher prices for grain, oilseeds and other crops in 2015-16 and summer 2016, and relatively good returns, allowed farmers to adequately finance winter crop sowing," the briefing said.

Furthermore, the Russian government had been more generous with loans, which for operations stretching back to last year's spring sowings had "reached 330.2bn roubles – a jump of 32% year on year.

Improving projections of food security remains a significant challenge in African countries, where low-input smallholder systems account for most of the agricultural production.  

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has long been at the forefront of systems analyses and crop modeling research, from the International Benchmark Sites Network for Agro-technology Transfer (IBSNAT) in the 1980s to the recent AgMIP Project. This continued institutional commitment contributed to the emergence of a class of particularly agile models such as DSSAT and APSIM. These models are able to mimic non-linear plant growth processes and low-input cropping systems, and widely used globally.

A next logical step is the ability to reliably simulate yields over space, and use aggregated forecasts to improve food security on sub-national to national scales. That is the challenge taken up by the CCAFS-funded project called 'Capacitating African Smallholders with Climate Advisories and Insurance Development' (CASCAID). Under CASCAID, ICRISAT works with the University of Florida and the Agrhymet Regional Centre to calibrate the CCAFS Regional Agricultural Forecasting Tool (CRAFT) for yield forecasting in West Africa. From November 28 2016, a 2 week-long workshop at University of Florida brought together West African resource persons to fine-tune CRAFT for that purpose, using historical reference data from Mali’s cotton growing belt.

An official report issued by the Agricultural Research Center, affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture, criticized the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation for announcing the success of cultivating wheat twice a year in Egypt, saying it poses a threat to the future of its cultivation due to the lack of scientific cultivation basics.

The center added in a report that productivity is less than 3 ardeb per acre, making the total production of wheat 12 ardeb through the two seasons, rather than 18 ardeb per season.

The report pointed out that the large number of wheat spikes were futile, and criticized the high humidity which exceeded 35 percent, compared to 12 percent in the normal wheat cropping seasons. The ministry also harvested the crop 30 days earlier than scheduled, the report said.

The report emphasized that the cultivation of wheat using the techniques recently announced by the Irrigation Ministry is completely contrary to the ecological system of growing wheat in Egypt, and thus is a waste of time and money. It would confuse farmers and cause them to incur heavy losses.

The cultivation of wheat in September violates the scientific cultivation methods of spring crops, according to the report.

Gathering wheat as announced by the Irrigation Ministry on January 26 is "nonsense" because the wheat was still unripe, the report added, pointing out that the early harvest of wheat causes diseases to the crop.

Canada's wheat production will remain elevated this year, while canola production will come within an ace of a record high – yet still leave the country with only "pipeline supplies" of the oilseed, officials said.

Canada's farm ministry, AAFC, in its first forecasts for 2017-18, estimated the country's wheat harvest at 29.1m tonnes – a drop of 2.6m tonnes year on year but a figure which would nonetheless rank as the fourth biggest in 20 years.

The harvest of durum wheat, the type used to make pasta, will plunge by 25% to 5.8m tonnes as the impact of a 15% drop in area, "due to large carry-in stocks… is compounded by a return to trend yields" from the record results achieved in 2016.

However, the decline will be offset in part by growth in spring wheat sowings, wchih account for the majority of Canada's crop, and are seen rising by 6% as a "result of low carry-in stocks, a shift out of winter wheat and durum, and increased interest in growing high yielding varieties", AAFC said.

A harvest at the forecast level will allow Canadian wheat exports, including durum, of 21.3m tonnes in 2017-18 – a marginal rise year on year, and a result which would also rank as the fourth largest in the past two decades.

Les céréales étaient en léger recul lundi après-midi sur un marché européen assez attentiste après les incertitudes nées des décisions du président américain Donald Trump, notamment sur l'immigration. Vers 16H00 (15H00 GMT), la tonne de blé perdait 1,25 euro sur l'échéance de mars, à 168,25 euros et un euro sur l'échéance de mai à 169,25 euros, dans un volume de 13.000 lots échangés.
"Il y a eu un effet Trump qui a refroidi les tenants du libre-échange", commentait un analyste du cabinet Inter-Courtage. Il citait également la crise diplomatique entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, traditionnel gros débouché pour les céréales 

La tonne de maïs, elle, perdait 75 centimes d'euro sur Euronext, sur mars à 170,50 euros et sur juin à 171,50 euros, dans un volume d'échanges de quelque 700 lots. "En l'absence de réels risques climatiques pour le moment, les cours des céréales demeurent orientés à la baisse face au poids des bilans", notait pour sa part le cabinet Agritel.

Highlights
• Under future climates elevated CO2 and increased heat stress will impact on wheat yields and quality.
• Many crop models are restricted to simulating the quality variables of average grain size and grain-N content.
• Crop models generally donot predict more detailed whole-grain physical characteristics or protein composition.
• New state variables are needed in our crop models to accommodate a broader range of grain quality parameters.
• Such models provide a tool for developing adaptation strategies to limit impacts of climate change to global grain quality.

Abstract
Maintaining grain quality of wheat under climate change is critical for human nutrition, end-use functional properties, as well as commodity value. This paper reviews the current knowledge of high temperature and elevated atmospheric CO2 on whole-grain and functional properties of wheat. It also considers the utility of contemporary crop models for investigating the impacts of climate change on wheat quality; and discusses opportunities for advancing model capability. Under elevated CO2 wheat yield can increase by up to 36%, but universally grain protein concentration decreases and a shift in composition translates to reduced functional properties. High temperature during the post-anthesis period of crops can cause a step change reduction in grain-set, grain size and milling yield. [...]