Using crop biodiversity to build the farming systems of the future: a matter of equity

Crop biodiversity, a pillar of innovative farming practices, encompasses all the plants used in agriculture. It is one of the levers for food security in a context of multiple crises: climate, environmental and food.

This biodiversity can be used to conserve plant varieties and to keep biodiversity alive by means of cropping methods and practices. These issues are vital for:

• guaranteeing crop diversity and food security,
• helping farmers make the ecological transition, to boost their resilience,
• allowing breeders to produce varieties tailored to today's challenges, such as climate change, emerging diseases, etc,
• and satisfying the needs of consumers and value chains.

Multi-dimensional, active biodiversity

While over-exploitation is a threat to wild biodiversity, crop biodiversity must be used actively and continuously to ensure its sustainability. Using varieties regularly is an essential precondition for their preservation and transmission.

This diversity is biological (it rests on a diversity of varieties and species), social (it depends on the know-how and practices of the farmers and communities that maintain it) and cultural (it reflects local heritages). It enables diverse, autonomous and resilient production operations, while promoting agricultural know-how and consolidating global food security. The resilience of farming systems depends on it, particularly in a context of growing uncertainty. This means that the question of how to manage crop biodiversity and its sustainability is now more acute than ever.

A major matter of equity 

Access to crop biodiversity is a matter of equity and of social and environmental justice, given the variety of resources and players with a multiplicity of contexts and objectives. It is therefore crucial to guarantee its availability, so as to foster the agroecological transition and boost resilience in the face of food security and environmental issues. This requires inclusive consideration and collaborative management, by means of decentralized transdisciplinary, multi-player cooperation, in which it is vital that researchers, farmers, farmers' organizations and others participate to design resistant varieties suited to local conditions, thus fostering sustainable farming systems. It is therefore important to link research to farming practices by encouraging knowledge sharing and building capacity among local players to allow them to take part in research. As a result, CIRAD stresses the importance of considering not just the technical environment of crop biodiversity, but also its social and institutional dimension.

Inclusive seed governance

The question of seed governance is more than just a simple issue: it is a determining factor in preserving, regulating and promoting crop biodiversity. 

For management to be more inclusive and resilient, seed governance must: 

• Integrate in situ and ex situ conservation for dynamic management, to prevent unequal access to and use of seeds, and to improve relations between stakeholders and revisit the dissemination of crop biodiversity;
• Rethink access and exchanges to ensure greater inclusiveness, by involving local communities and farmers in governance and promoting their traditional know-how alongside scientific knowledge;
• Align technical, social and institutional dimensions to ensure holistic, equitable and non-monetary governance of institutional collections on an international level, such as those hosted by biological resource centres (BRCs), to alleviate inequalities within a heterogeneous group of players;
• Promote equitable, dynamic collaborations based on profit sharing and develop funding that takes account of the multiplicity of resources and satisfies actual needs for conservation, agroecological transition and social equity when using crop biodiversity.