In The Beginning

Each harvest time, early farmers selected the best plants in their fields to keep seeds to sow again the next year. Over the generations, their crops became better and better attuned to local conditions and needs.

These farmers shared their seeds, and each farmer in turn selected the plants and seeds that gave them what they were looking for – seed size, color, reliable yield, pest and disease resistance and so forth. The diversity of the farmers’ varieties — also known as landraces — grew and their characteristics changed, from place to place, but also over time.

Now jump forward in time — thousands of years. Professional plant breeders come into the picture. They want to develop new, improved varieties in a more systematic way. How? By crossing plants with different characteristics.

They select as parents landraces that would give them the best combinations of characteristics.

One landrace is short but late maturing. Another tall but early maturing. Cross them and you might end up with, among lots of other combinations, a plant that was short and early maturing. Interesting!

Slowly, by repeating this process again and again, breeders produced stable varieties where all the plants from a batch of seed were pretty much the same, and had the exact combination of characteristics they wanted — or, rather, that they thought that farmers wanted.

This is a costly, time-consuming business. But profitable. So it soon became the focus of plant breeders working for commercial seed companies.

Gradually, agriculture moved from a subsistence activity aiming to feed a farmer’s household to a more market-oriented endeavor. Farmers started buying seed that met the specific characteristics demanded by the market, and the old customs of saving and sharing seeds started disappearing.

Modern improved crop varieties deliver higher yields – under ideal conditions – and easier handling for farmers and markets alike. But this can come at the cost of narrowing the genetic diversity of the crops in farmers’ fields.

From literally thousands of local landraces, for many crops  we have moved to fewer commercial varieties, each grown over large areas, many of which share ancestors.

This loss of diversity in fields increases vulnerability to droughts, too much rain, pests and diseases. Where in the past a disease outbreak might wipe out a few fields, now it can spread rapidly through an entire region, causing devastating losses. Unless, of course, breeders come up with a new variety: they’re always playing catch-up.

Today, farmers also face climate change – increasingly extreme weather, heat waves, intense rainfall, high winds and new pests and diseases.

We urgently need new crop varieties that don’t succumb to these stresses, that give reliable yields under a wide range of conditions. And deliver the nutrition we all need.

Crop diversity must come to the rescue again. And this includes crop wild relatives, the sturdy distant cousins of our domesticated crops.

Breeders are taking on this challenge. Farmers, too. Together, they are developing new crops to meet new challenges.

For this to work, breeders, farmers and others need continuous access to crop diversity. This means that diversity must be kept safe somewhere where it is easily available to everyone who needs it. Those places are called genebanks.

For farmers, for their families, for everybody.