Our friends at Bioversity International have a nice piece on IUCN’s website summarizing their work on in situ conservation of crop wild relatives with over 60 partners in five countries around the world. I liked the general tone of understatement: “What became obvious from the project’s outset was that the in situ conservation of CWR is not an easy task and cannot be achieved alone.” The practical lessons of the project have been brought together in a manual.
The piece also includes a trenchant quote from a recent IUCN publication: ((Amend T., Brown J., Kothari A., Phillips A. and Stolton S. (eds.) 2008. Protected Landscapes and Agrobiodiversity Values. Volume 1 in the series, Protected Landscapes and Seascapes, IUCN & GTZ. Kasparek Verlag, Heidelberg.))
In general, the idea that the conservation of agrobiodiversity is a potentially valuable function of a protected area is as yet little recognised. For example, it would appear from the case studies that it hardly ever appears explicitly in protected area legislation, and rarely in management plans. Indeed, a study by WWF found that the degree of protection in places with the highest levels of crop genetic diversity is significantly lower than the global average; and even where protected areas did overlap with areas important for crop genetic diversity (i.e. landraces and crop wild relatives), little attention was given to these values in the management of the area (Stolton et al 2006).
Understatement indeed. The danger is that CWR will be included in reserve management to provide a justification for what is now seen as a failing methodology – kicking out all people (‘fences and fines’ approach). A more sensible approach would be to encourage farming, land management, the collection of medicinal plants (and maintaining local knowledge) in reserves. There is no chance whatever of this in most protected areas (now covering an area equal to the size of South America).
Erebuni sounds reasonable, but what is the value of a wild Theobroma (apparently not yet identified), a wild Cinnamomum and a wild Amygdalus in various reserves? The fact that they are rare is nothing to do with their value to breeders now or in the future.
I was once told that a vast area of the Western Ghats in India needed conserving to preserve a wild nutmeg (Myristica). There are literally hundreds of Myristica all over the place (and I’m not sure any demand at all from breeders for wild species).
Unless well-targeted, CWR in reserves is less effective and far more expensive than CWR maintenance in orchard collections such as the superb one in CATIE in Costa Rice for coffee, cacao, peach palm and hundreds more perennial crops.