This new analysis assesses 29 of the world’s most important food crops and reveals severe threats to just over half of their wild relatives, as they are not adequately saved in genebanks and not available to researchers and plant breeders for crop improvement.
Climate change is predicted to cause the substantial decline of agricultural production in the coming decades, and together with rising food prices, this will hit the poorest first and hardest. This global analysis forms part of a larger partnership to collect and conserve the wild relatives of the world’s major food crops.
The initiative, led by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust) in partnership with Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank and in collaboration with national and international agricultural research institutes, is the largest ever global effort to conserve crop wild relatives. These wild plants contain essential traits that could be bred into crops to make them more hardy and versatile in the face of dramatically different climates expected in the coming years. The Norwegian government is providing funding for this ten-year initiative. Find out more about how Kew is helping to strengthen food security.
... “This is a major step forward in the global effort to make our food crops more resilient to the effects of climate change,” says Andy Jarvis, leader of CIAT’s Decision and Policy Analysis Research Area, which conducted the research. “Crop wild relatives are a potential treasure trove of useful characteristics that scientists can put to good use for making agriculture more resilient and improving the livelihoods of millions of people.”...
Flowering wheat, shot by Aalang, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license
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