Not small potatoes: Preserving potato varieties in Peru is vital to global food security. Thanks to a new $116 million global fund established this summer, the Quechua Indians are being paid to maintain their diverse collection of rare potatoes and ensure that they will be available to help the world adapt to future climate change. The Quechua are one of 11 communities around the world, chosen for the important collection of crops they farm, which together are part of a major new initiative to ensure that the world has the options it might need to cope with future food crises. Other countries involved include Cuba, where they will be focusing on maize and beans, as well as oranges in Egypt and wheat in Tanzania. The fund, a cornerstone of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), aims to maintain a reservoir of essential species for all our major food crops. "Agricultural biodiversity is essential," Dr Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the Treaty, told CNN. "It is really the global insurance that in the future we will be able to adapt to problems like climate change and population growth." Just as biodiversity is now seen as the cornerstone of the resilience of natural world, so having a broad variety of agricultural crops is essential to the resilience of agriculture. Different species of plants are often able to cope with widely differing environmental conditions and many obscure varieties could hide vital disease resistance. But the world's valuable diversity is disappearing incredibly fast. "The figures are quite disturbing," said Dr Bhatti. Over the millennia, humans have relied on more than 10,000 different plant species for food. Today, we have barely 150 species under cultivation -- and of those only 12 species provide 80 percent of all of our food needs. Four of those -- rice, wheat, maize and potatoes -- provide more than half of our energy requirements. As global markets have grown and seed production and agriculture become more commercialized, the old system of farmers saving their own seeds - and by doing so a myriad of different crops, often closely adapted to local conditions - has almost disappeared. As a result variety is dwindling towards a vanishing point. China has lost 90 percent of the wheat varieties it had just 60 years ago. In the United States more than 90 percent of fruit tree and vegetable varieties found in farmers' fields at the beginning of the twentieth century are no longer there. Mexico has lost 80 percent of its corn varieties. India has lost 90 percent of its rice varieties "They're gone; they've disappeared forever," said Dr Bhatti. "From a food security point of view this makes the world's farmers much more vulnerable to pests... and increases the vulnerability of some poor countries to price shocks in global commodity markets."

Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/09/04/food.biodiversity/

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