Securing the world’s crop diversity is a global concern and a prerequisite for future food and nutrition security. Only by safeguarding crop diversity in perpetuity, and making it available for use by researchers, plant breeders and farmers, can we adopt agriculture to the climate crisis, reduce environmental destruction and improve livelihoods? Plant breeders and scientists use crop diversity to develop new, more resilient and productive varieties that consumers want to eat, that are nutritious and tasty, and that are adapted to local preferences, environments and challenges.
-The Threats to Crop Diversity
Yet we are losing the diversity of crops and their wild relatives at an alarming rate. This erosion of crop diversity in the food system is undermining and deteriorating at a very rapid pace. Increasingly rapid environmental, technological and social changes in agricultural practices, the emergence and spread of new pests and diseases, and conflict, are causing crop diversity to disappear in many places around the world. This applies also to the diversity conserved in gene banks if they are not properly maintained.
It is only through conserving and using crop diversity to adopt agriculture to the effects of climate change that we will meet one of humanity’s greatest challenges; by producing sufficient and nutritious food for an increasing global population in the face of multiple crises.
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