Cultivating biodiversity to transform agriculture
E. Hainzelin (ed.), Springer, 2013.

Contact

Didier Bazile (crop biodiversity)

Christian Leclerc (anthropogenetics, plant material exchanges)

Biodiversity as a lever of development and resilience

The issues

Biodiversity is a vital part of all agricultural production, but farming systems centring on homogenizing practices and landscapes shrink that biodiversity and often pose a threat to ecosystems . To foster the emergence or productive, sustainable and resilient systems, agricultural research must take account the living world in its entirety, and the interactions between communities within production systems and landscapes or at the interface between agrosystems and natural ecosystems.

Those sustainable systems will mean taking account of producers' expertise and innovation capacity, studying, documenting and mobilizing biodiversity on various levels, and rethinking how agricultural production systems and landscapes are organized .

CIRAD is working with its partners to study the conditions in which conserving, restoring, mobilizing and exploiting biodiversity could help alleviate poverty and boost food security and safety. The overall objectives centre on the following main points:

  • promoting existing skills or recommending new ones, to make optimum use of the genetic resources and services supplied by biodiversity;
  • supporting ecological restoration, to make degraded systems more diversified;
  • integrating biodiversity into policies aimed at tackling inequality;
  • supporting the collective organizations and management practices on which biodiversity depends.
Update date: 05/03/2019