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Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
Why gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
The background to this is the global biodiversity crisis; the rate of species loss, which is hundreds of times faster than it has been in the last 10 million years, has led some to declare we are in the midst of a “sixth extinction.” But few are aware that agrobiodiversity — the range of plants and livestock that feed us — is also in rapid decline. Indigenous communities around the world are storehouses of such traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), from the controlled burns once used in the Americas to manage game and edible plant populations and limit the fuel for wildfires, to the ancient agroforestry methods that have shaped the Amazon basin. This is an important win, but the true riches of Ukraine lie in the chernozem, the nation’s dark, humus-rich loam, where varieties of beets, barley, potatoes, rye, and bread wheat will continue to evolve — conflict permitting — in an ever-changing environment.
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