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Bioversity International is shaking up the food system says Food Tank
Bioversity International was mentioned by the Food Tank: The Food Think Tank as one of the 40 organizations that are shaking up the food system. "Our hope is that the more people know about the work that these groups are doing, the more people can be inspired to make their own change in the food system," said the co-founders of the blog.
Semantics for Biodiversity – International Workshop
The 1st international workshop on Web Semantics for Biodiversity, held on 27 May in Montpellier, France, will define key challenges identified by the bioinformatics community, discuss solutions and identify opportunities emerging from interactions across plant science and informatics disciplines.
International conferences and meetings
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On farm conservation
On farm conservation protects threatened plants in their natural habitats. Photo: S. Mann/Bioversity
Bioversity's on farm conservation research is focused on keeping landraces and crop wild relatives of cultivated plants growing and valued by smallholder farmers.
On farm conservation (or in situ conservation) protects threatened plants in their natural habitats and takes into account social and cultural factors such as farmers’ knowledge.
Why is in-situ conservation important?
While genebanks are important role to safeguard crop diversity for future use, they do not yet contain many that may be critical to the livelihoods of poor rural farmers.
In situ methods such as 'on farm' and 'home garden' conservation also enable plants to continue to evolve and hence adapt to changing conditions.
On farm agricultural biodiversity conservation - the need for research
The 2010 FAO State of the World Report II on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture depicts an alarming and worrying situation - despite considerable progress made on ex situ conservation, very limited efforts to curb the genetic and cultural erosion taking place on farm have been recorded, yet this is where the largest amount of diversity is found.
Furthermore, international policy instruments in support of agrobiodiversity are currently focusing on crops listed in Annex I of the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources, thus excluding thousands of other nutritious and often endangered crops and varieties from being properly safeguarded, conserved and promoted.
On-farm conservation practices, so far, lack the approaches, guidelines, methods and tools that would assist farmers both in deriving livelihood benefits and in playing their ‘custodian’ role more effectively and efficiently.
Documenting on farm crop diversity so that we know what is being currently grown, how, by whom, for what purpose and how it is being threatened, represents an urgent and essential task for guiding the development of sound national conservation strategies based on the integration of ex situ and in situ/on-farm conservation methods.
Read more:
For more information, contact: 
Dr. Stefano Padulosi
 | Bioversity International is a member of the CGIAR consortium |
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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