The Environmental Food Crisis

Enhancing sustainability through the use of crop wild relatives

Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species or other taxa more or less closely related to crops, which include most of the progenitors of our domesticated types – have made a very significant contribution to modern agricultural production through the characteristics that they have contributed to plant cultivars. Over the last 100 years, crop wild relatives have become increasingly important as sources of useful genes. For ex- ample, they have contributed resistance to pest and disease (e.g,. resistance to late blight in potato and grassy stunt vi- rus in rice, which came from a single accession of Oryza ni- vara found in Orissa, India) and to abiotic stress. They have also increased nutritional values such as protein and vita- min content. The economic returns from investment in CWR can be striking; for example, genetic material from a tomato wild relative has allowed plant breeders to boost the level of solids in commercial varieties by 2.4%, which is worth US$250 million annually to processors in California alone (FAO, 1998). The natural populations of many crop wild relatives are in- creasingly at risk, mainly from habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation. Moreover, the increasing industrialization of agriculture is reducing populations of crop wild relatives in and around farms. They are often missed by conservation programmes, falling between the efforts of agricultural and environmental conservation actions. A major global effort, coordinated by Bioversity International and supported by UNEP GEF, to find ways of securing the improved conserva- tion of crop wild relatives is in progress in 5 countries (Ar- menia, Bolivia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan) in collaboration with a number of international agencies (FAO, UNEP-WCMC, IUCN and Botanic Gardens Conservation In- ternational – BGCI)

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