Nigel Maxted has just sent a brief personal take on the recent Kew 250th anniversary celebrations to the Crop Wild Relatives discussion group. Here’s a snippet:
Personally I felt the audience was very receptive to the use and need for CWR conservation, but in my view far too many talks outside of the Plant conservation and agriculture session still failed to make the link between conservation and use. I would judge the gulf between the biodiversity and PGR sectors is still a problem that we need to address if we are to have ‘joined-up’ conservation of all biodiversity.
You can download Nigel’s presentation, “A global approach to crop wild relative conservation: Securing our food and agriculture gene pool.” But watch out, it’s a big PowerPoint file.