Crop diversity embraces the great variety within and between crops and their wild relatives. Not only are there hundreds of species of crops - from wheat to carrots to mangoes - but each species may also have hundreds or thousands of varieties containing subtle yet important genetic differences. These varieties evolved over thousands of years in a dynamic interaction between nature and farmers’ careful selection and breeding.

Each crop variety may be adapted to a particular type of soil, climate and growing season. Its genes may endow it with traits needed by farmers: disease resistance, cold or heat tolerance, special taste or nutritional qualities. These qualities provide farmers and plant breeders with raw materials to improve their crops and adapt them to changing environmental conditions.

For example, farmers have adapted varieties of maize that flourish in the Brazilian prairies and the northern Mexican deserts, in the mountainous highlands of the Andes and the islands of the Philippines. Different varieties of maize may be particularly high in protein or good for making tortillas, grits or flour.

Why We Need New Crops
Agriculture is already astonishingly productive by traditional standards, yet output must roughly double in the next 50 years just to keep pace with rising population. This must be achieved in the face of changing climate, diminishing resources, and global conflict. Then, yields sufficient to nurture 10 billion people must be sustained century after century into the future. This can only be achieved by providing a steady stream of new crop varieties that collectively must yield more than ever before and under harsher conditions--conditions that are unprecedented in history. The raw materials for these new crops are the genes that shape their form and behaviour. And the vast majority of those genes must be derived from existing plants--modern varieties, ancient ‘landraces,’ and the wild relatives of crops. Yet these vital crop resources have been disappearing at a terrible rate over the past century, even though much has been done to stop the extinction over the past few decades, not least by the Future Harvest Centres but also by governments, academic institutions, and private companies. That in a nutshell, is the problem: the loss of crop diversity. It affects us all.

The world’s population stood at around two billion (two thousand million) in the 1920s, had risen to three billions by the 1960s, and now stands at billion. United Nations demographers predict that numbers will rise to perhaps 10 billion by around 2050, and should then level off (simply because so many people today are opting to have smaller families).

Human beings are large, voracious creatures; collectively, thanks to farming, we have long since broken the ecological law that says that ‘big, fierce animals are rare’. We have already farmed most of the land that is worth farming and although we continue to encroach into ever more marginal regions we are now losing at least as much land as we are gaining to the growing cities and roads. So on the present farmed area, or perhaps on less, we have to roughly double present output and then maintain that new high level for century after century. At present, we do produce enough for the six billion people on the Earth but even so, for various reasons, in 1997-99 an estimated 815 million (more than one in eight of all people) were chronically undernourished. Undernourishment is in turn linked to poverty. Around 1.2 billion people worldwide (one fifth of the world’s total) now live on less than $US1 per day.

The effects of changing climate and diminishing resources can only be guessed, but scenarios far short of the worst that are conceivable are still very sobering. Today, fresh water accounts for less than one per cent of the world’s total water supply and is diminishing apace, largely through pollution. Notably, about 20 percent of the world’s irrigated land is now salinated; nearly two million hectares are lost to excessive salt each year. Irrigation has brought huge areas of wilderness into production--17 percent of all cropland is irrigated, and it yields 40 percent of all the world’s food--but irrigation clearly brings problems of its own and can no longer be seen as a panacea. The world’s best topsoils are disappearing in the wind and in the rivers. Some countries, like China, are acting concertedly to stop the erosion but, worldwide, the battle is being lost. FAO estimates that with current practices, 140 million hectares of high quality soil will be degraded by 2010, mostly in Africa and Asia.

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