Biocultural diversity and crop improvement

Abstract

Biocultural diversity is the ever-evolving and irreplaceable sum total of all living organisms inhabiting the Earth. It plays a significant role in sustainable productivity and ecosystem services that benefit humanity and is closely allied with human cultural diversity. Despite its essentiality, biodiversity is seriously threatened by the insatiable and inequitable human exploitation of the Earth’s resources. One of the benefits of biodiversity is its utilization in crop improvement, including cropping improvement (agronomic cultivation practices) and genetic improvement (plant breeding). Crop improvement has tended to decrease agricultural biodiversity since the origins of agriculture, but awareness of this situation can reverse this negative trend. Cropping improvement can strive to use more diverse cultivars and a broader complement of crops on farms and in landscapes. It can also focus on underutilized crops, including legumes. Genetic improvement can access a broader range of biodiversity sources and, with the assistance of modern breeding tools like genomics, can facilitate the introduction of additional characteristics that improve yield, mitigate environmental stresses, and restore, at least partially, lost crop biodiversity. The current legal framework covering biodiversity includes national intellectual property and international treaty instruments, which have tended to limit access and innovation to biodiversity. A global system of access and benefit sharing, encompassing digital sequence information, would benefit humanity but remains an elusive goal. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework sets forth an ambitious set of targets and goals to be accomplished by 2030 and 2050, respectively, to protect and restore biocultural diversity, including agrobiodiversity.