"Meet The Cool Beans Designed To Beat Climate Change"

"A planet that is warming at extraordinary speed may require extraordinary new food crops. The latest great agricultural hope is beans that can thrive in temperatures that cripple most conventional beans. They're now growing in test plots of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, in Colombia.

Many of these "heat-beater" beans resulted from a unique marriage, 20 years ago, of tradition and technology. The matchmaker was a Colombian scientist named Alvaro Mejia-Jimenez. But for almost two decades, his innovation sat on the shelf, unused.

Mejia-Jimenez was determined to cross-breed two different types of beans that normally are sexually incompatible: the common bean — a species that includes pinto, black and kidney beans — and the tepary bean, a little-known crop traditionally grown by indigenous communities in the American Southwest."

Dan Charles reports for NPR March 25, 2015.