Conservation Beyond Protected Areas: The Challenge of Landraces and Crop Wild Relatives

Abstract

One effect of the Green Revolution has been the displacement of landraces and traditional livestock strains. Although humankind has historically cultivated more than 7000 species, 15 crops now provide 90% of the world’s food energy intake. The shift from traditional to modern production systems has led to genetic erosion of many crop species, and to the disappearance of a number of landraces—plants that are morphologically distinct, have some genetic integrity but are also genetically variable and dynamic, and have distinctive properties in terms of yield, date of maturity, pest and disease resistance. The paper evaluates the effects of genetic erosion on wealth. Local wealth effects stem from the role of landraces and wild crop relatives in managing environmental risk, especially in the least developed countries. Global wealth effects stem from the fact that loss of genetic resources reduces our capacity to adapt to environmental (especially climate) change. Using the conservation principle implicit in the Hotelling arbitrage condition, it will consider the efficiency and equity implications of genetic erosion in agriculture and forestry and will address the particular conservation challenge posed by the need for genetically dynamic crop resources to be conserved in situ.