The father of India’s green revolution, M.S. Swaminathan, once famously said: “If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.”

A blistering heatwave and patchy monsoon rains in Asia have reinforced this claim, as food prices remained stubbornly high for months due to inclement weather and supply shocks from the Russia-Ukraine war.

Millions of tonnes of unharvested rice have also been affected by unusually heavy rain in central China’s Henan province [recently].

For the second year in a row the region is experiencing extreme weather, which shows climate change is happening here and now.

Gene editing, a technique that makes it possible to alter crops without introducing new genes, can also be used to help them withstand climate stress, said Shivendra Bajaj, a technical adviser at Asia-Pacific Seed Alliance, an organisation with more than 500 member companies in the region.

“There is no magic wand. No technique alone can give you the solution you are looking for,” he said. “If you keep on stacking everything, incremental changes will follow.”

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The power of digital technology can only be fully realised when governments work together to plan for water sharing, encourage farmers to switch to less resource-intensive crops, and save areas affected by natural disasters.

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