Food Security Rests On Wild Plant Genetic Diversity, Says UN 26/10/2010 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)The world’s future food security could ride on the ability to save the wild cousins of crops usually cultivated for human consumption, says a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report out today. The genetic information in wild types could prove necessary in future efforts to “reduce food insecurity in the face of climate change,” said a FAO press release. The full report, “State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture,” is available here. “There are thousands of crop wild relatives that still need to be collected, studied and documented because they hold genetic secrets that enable them to resist heat, droughts, salinity, floods and pests,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf in the release. One way to do this that has grown in popularity over the last decade is gene banks, the release says. But empirical evidence documented in the report shows that this critical food-related biodiversity is on the wane, with FAO estimating a 75 percent loss between 1900 and 2000 and predicting nearly a quarter of wild relatives will die out before 2055 due to climate change. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "Food Security Rests On Wild Plant Genetic Diversity, Says UN" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
[…] come across in law school that the genetic diversity of plants on our planet has decreased 75% in a century according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (largely due the loss of family seed banks), and more recent learning about the absolutely […] Reply