The Asia, the Pacific and Oceania region covers a vast area consisting of 45 countries stretching from Mongolia in the north to Tasmania in the south and from India in the west to the islands of Micronesia in the east. The region is characterized by diverse ecosystems and landscapes: highlands, semi-arid tropics and humid coastal plains with climates varying from temperate to tropical. The region is home to more than half of the world's people, many of whom are economically very poor but rich in culture and knowledge about agricultural biodiversity.

To find out more about biodiversity in the region, scroll down or click on the links below.

Cultural and biological diversity
A region of forests
Dealing with genetic erosion
Using available diversity to improve crops

Cultural and biological diversity
This varied environment, together with the long history of intensive agriculture in the region, has produced great genetic diversity in crops, forest species, wild crop relatives, livestock, poultry and fish. Another factor contributing to the enormous diversity in agricultural biodiversity is the rich mosaic of people and cultures found in the region, each of which has been selecting and using genetic resources to suit their particular needs for hundreds of generations.

Population migration and trade have spread crops and livestock to new locations, where they have evolved into diverse locally adapted varieties and breeds.

Domestication in this region took place in four main areas.

Crops such as eggplant (Solanum melongena), pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan), black pepper (Piper nigrum) and jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) originated from the Indian centre of diversity. Water buffalo, zebu cattle and chicken also originate from India.

Soyabean (Glycine max), onion (Allium cepa), cabbage (Brassica oleracea), peach (Prunus persica) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) developed in the Chinese centre. Pigs, the two-humped Bactrian camel and several key fish species, including the common carp, are also believed to have been domesticated in China.

Oriental rice (Oryza sativa), banana (Musa spp.), citrus (Citrus spp.), mango (Mangifera indica), yam (Dioscorea spp.) and taro (Colocasia esculenta) emerged from Southeast Asia. Coconut (Cocos nucifera) and breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) originated from the Pacific Islands.

Many underutilized crops that are of localized importance in the region show very great diversity at the species and genetic level and great potential for meeting the global demands for food and nutrition security. The same is true for tropical fruit species. Additionally, the genetic diversity in both indigenous and introduced species has been enhanced through extensive exchange of material within the region. For introduced crops like groundnut, sweetpotato and capsicum, this region has become the secondary centre of diversity.

Many of the species that originated in the region, such as rice, banana or coconut, moved across the Indian or Pacific oceans to Africa and/or the Americas, where secondary centres of diversity have arisen for some of these crops.

Soybeans originated in northern China but 74 percent of world production now comes from the Americas. Groundnut originated in South America but nowadays India and China grow 66 percent of the world's production.

This interdependence among regions is an important factor in development and exchange of material and a number of countries in the region recognize this.

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A region of forests
Almost all types of forest zones occur in the region, from dry deserts to humid tropical forest. These forests host a huge array of biodiversity, including sources of traditional medicines and significant amounts of wild relatives of crops and other useful plants, though much of their value is generally unrecognized.

These forests are important both for the region’s wood-based industries and also for over a billion rural people; forests play an important role in poverty alleviation through the income-generating opportunities that various wood and non-wood forest products offer to local communities and national economies. Currently wood is a basic fuel for more than 2 billion people in the region. The annual world trade in bamboo and rattan is currently estimated at US$5000 million.

In addition to fuel-wood and traditional medicines, forests provide a significant amount of foods that supplement what is obtained from agriculture. Forests also conserve soil and water resources, help to mitigate climate change and maintain cultural and religious heritages.

The importance of tropical forests has been widely recognized but their area is still diminishing and the remaining forests are being degraded. Tropical Asia has one of the highest rates of deforestation, losing around 1 percent of its forests each year between 2000 and 2005, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). However, there are increasing global and national efforts to promote sustainable forest management for multiple benefits and this is likely to improve the situation. These efforts need to be supported and enhanced, at both the operational and technical level to avoid planting of genetically uniform materials that might lead to future disasters.

Deforestation and subsequent fragmentation are major threats to forest genetic resources. Many forest species in the region have been exposed to over-exploitation or the forests have been converted for agricultural use to such an extent that the species' future existence is in jeopardy. Thus, there is an urgent need to conserve and manage forest genetic resources to halt genetic erosion and to prevent the irreversible losses by extinction. The task involves improving policies and actions to ensure the existence and evolution of the genetic resources as an integral part of sustainable forest management. Only in this way can tropical forests provide the products and services in the future and contribute to sustainable development in the region and elsewhere.

Several countries in the Asia–Pacific region have taken steps to implement sustainable forest management practices. However, there is a need to further promote management of forest genetic resources within this process. National programmes on forest genetic resources are not well established in many countries in the region. To support national forest genetic resources programmes and regional collaboration between them, The Asia Pacific Association of Forestry Research Institutions (APAFRI) and Bioversity, together with other national and international partners, have initiated the development of Asia Pacific Forest Genetic Resources Programme (APFORGEN).

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Dealing with genetic erosion
There is severe genetic erosion underway in crop, forestry and livestock species in the region, but the full extent is not well understood.

Population growth, deforestation, erosion, changing land use and climatic factors are major drivers of the process of genetic erosion. Demand for food is increasing as population numbers rise and competition for water resources is becoming intense. Added to this are the widely different stages of economic development seen in among countries in the region, from fully industrialized to least developed status. Many of the countries in the region are now undergoing rapid transformation, along with political changes, toward highly competitive export economies, increased urbanization and a rapid shift in agriculture from subsistence-based to highly market-driven farming.

Although such changes have resulted in higher incomes for the populations of these countries, there are concerns about the sustainability of some of these changes. In particular, biodiversity is declining. In face of the rapid changes in the region it is essential to conserve these vanishing plant and animal genetic resources, and to understand better the linkages to agricultural and economic systems that affect diversity and sustainable production.

The existence of highly industrialized countries in the same region as countries with less developed infrastructures, greater resource constraints and poorly developed genetic resources systems offers tremendous opportunities for promoting collaboration and support among the countries in Asia, the Pacific and Oceania.

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Using available diversity to improve crops
Several major plant genebanks are located in APO. These include the national genebanks of China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea and Thailand. Plant breeding and the production of new cultivars is widely regarded as critical to agricultural improvement and increased production. Despite this, yield stagnation and crop failures resulting from genetic uniformity are widespread in the region, suggesting a continuing failure to achieve the full potential of plant breeding.

Several landmark studies in the past have alerted the scientific community and the public to the dangers of basing crop improvement on a narrow genetic base. The world’s governments have explicitly recognized this in both the FAO Global Plan of Action (GPA) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s decision on agricultural biological diversity. The Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the CBD identified this as one of the key elements of the GPA (Decision III/11). Since 1996, both FAO and Bioversity have taken steps to promote base broadening. However, not much could be achieved due to severe lack of funds.

It is now increasingly accepted that future crop productivity increases can only be achieved sustainably through an increased use of plant genetic resources, including wild relatives and exotic materials, in plant breeding. A great amount of diversity has been assembled ex situ and maintained in situ on farms. However, one of the major problems hindering the utilization of plant genetic resources is how to get the unadapted genetic diversity into a form that can easily be used by breeders and farmers. Much available germplasm in the primary, secondary and tertiary genepools of crops is not in a form that breeders can easily use.

Therefore, there is a strong need to initiate large-scale programmes of pre-breeding/germplasm enhancement and base broadening on important crops. Genebank curators also need to get involved in this type of work so that they can facilitate increased use of the plant genetic resources that they conserve by making them readily usable by plant breeders and other crop improvement scientists in the region.

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