Food Security Rests On Wild Plant Genetic Diversity, Says UN

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.