Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
To the Genebank Academy and Landscape Academy we should now add the Center for Plant Conservation’s Rare Plant Academy. I wonder if we can think of a collective noun for this proliferation? My initial suggestion is in the title.
Oh what a time to be alive.
Two articles about the contrasting fortunes of Andean crops came out last week. They describe different sides of the same broad story: Indigenous agricultural systems are highly biodiverse and increasingly positioned as climate adaptation strategies, but they are also under pressure.
In Peru, potato farmers in places like the Parque de la Papa are actively conserving thousands of native potato varieties as a form of insurance. This is climate change adaptation: maintaining agrobiodiversity, preserving traditional knowledge, and using resilient crop varieties and farming practices to buffer against warming temperatures, erratic rainfall, and pest and disease pressure. The message is that crop diversity itself is a survival strategy, both ecological and cultural.
The recent history of quinoa in Bolivia shows the same system under a different kind of stress: global demand drove a commodity boom that incentivized monoculture expansion and mechanization, which in turn contributed to soil degradation, erosion and reduced resilience. Coming back from that is proving difficult.
Together, the two cases show that when Indigenous agroecosystems are treated as living repositories of diversity, they can enhance resilience, including to climate change; and that when they are pulled into boom-driven export specialization, that resilience can be undermined. The shared lesson, at least for me, is that climate adaptation in mountain agriculture depends on maintaining ecological and genetic diversity embedded in Indigenous land management systems.
A point that I suspect is highlighted in the book Andean Potatoes and Quinoa: Origin, Current Status and Recipes of Ancestral Crops, also recently announced.
FAO has a 6-page leaflet out on “Seed systems – Twenty things you need to know.” It’s well-written and comprehensive. These are the 20 things, in case you were wondering:
Comprehensive, as I say. Even genebanks get a shout-out:
Crop variety loss also reduces the diversity of our cropping systems, thus making them more vulnerable to stresses. That’s why conservation is so important. By safeguarding inter- and intra-specific diversity of crops in genebanks and through on-farm management of diversity varieties are prevented from disappearing forever, their useful traits are documented, and this diversity remains available for the current and future generations. Conserved varieties are an essential resource for plant breeders, as they can be sources of important traits, such as stress resistance or nutritional quality, to be incorporated into new crop varieties.
Though I would personally have maybe included a nod to the potential direct role of genebanks in seed systems. Feeding breeding pipelines is surely not the only way genebanks can make an impact, especially for so-called neglected and underutilized crops — or opportunity crops as we should now call them I guess.