“Failure to act ... would make what is happening today look like the calm before the storm,” Cary Fowler, head of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Fund, said on the sidelines of a June 3-5 UN food summit.

“We will need totally different plant varieties” to confront climate change for crops such as rice, wheat, maize or sugar, he said. The Fund opened a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic in February, seeking to store away all crop seed varieties.

“These are the tyres on the car. The car doesn’t go anywhere without them,” he said of seeds that underpin life on earth.

More droughts, floods, heatwaves, stronger storms or rising seas projected by the UN Climate Panel for coming decades will affect where crops can grow and could jeopardise UN goals of raising farm output to feed a rising population.

“We need crops to fit the climate,” he said. “Are we prepared? No.”

Fowler said it was a common misconception that crops now grown in Italy, for instance, could simply be planted further north if the climate warmed.

“Soils, pests and diseases are different,” he said. And crops flower in response to the length of daylight, seasonal rains and rely on insect pollinators that might not be around at the right time in a new habitat.

The Rome summit is seeking ways to secure food supplies in the face of rising demand especially from rapidly developing Asian countries poor harvests and rising fuel costs.

BREEDERS: Plant breeders will need to tap seed banks, such as the Arctic vault that has amassed about 220,000 seed varieties out of a worldwide total of perhaps 1.5 million, he said.