50 Years of Traditional Crop Conservation a Success, but Some Crops Still Lack Protection

A global analysis of the representation of traditional farmer varieties (often called landraces) of 25 major crops in gene banks around the world has shown that tremendous progress has been made over more than a half-century toward their conservation, while also identifying the most important gaps remaining to be filled. Their global study "State of ex situ conservation of landrace groups of twenty-five major crops," was published May 9 in the journal Nature Plants.

Colin Khoury, a lead author on the paper, is a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and Director of Science and Conservation at the San Diego Botanic Garden. A core group of authors spent three years traveling to the CGIAR centers, each of which maintains vast gene bank collections of crops such as wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, beans, and cassava. They assessed the degree to which such collections represent the diversity of landraces that farmers cultivate in their fields.

These landraces, along with their wild relatives, are important resources used by crop breeders, as each has a different combination of traits, including resistance to particular pests and diseases, tolerance to drought or heat or cold or salty soils, and different flavor and nutritional profiles. Due to the enormous environmental and social change that has occurred worldwide over the past 100 years, many farmers no longer grow these varieties, and many habitats where their wild relatives once lived are now gone or have totally changed.

In the past 50 years, extensive global efforts have been made to collect landraces and wild relatives for maintenance in gene banks, both to ensure their conservation and to increase their availability for crop breeding and other types of research. These efforts led to the establishment of the international gene banks, as well as national, regional, and other collections. One of these gene banks is Future Seeds, which was just inaugurated in Palmira, Colombia.

To what degree these efforts have been successful in collecting and conserving landraces had not been previously assessed, however. A global analysis of the representation in gene banks of crop wild relatives was completed in 2016, also published in Nature Plants. This new research on landraces complements the earlier paper, in combination leading to clarity on the global status of conservation of the genetic diversity within 25 of the world's most important crops.