Food Crop Diversity

is key to sustainability M.P. Jones in a SciDev.Net article.
Excerpt:
"Only 150 crop species are grown commercially on a global scale, with wheat and maize alone providing over half of the world's protein and calorie needs. Another 7,000 species play crucial roles in poor people's livelihoods but are otherwise underutilised.

These underutilised species have important traditional uses for food, fibre, fodder, vegetable oil and medicines. But they also have unexploited commercial potential and, if used more widely, could provide important environmental services.

They could be developed to improve food security, alleviate poverty, improve nutrition, raise incomes, and sustain critical and fragile ecosystems.

Growing them commercially could make a vital contribution to halting and indeed reversing the loss of biodiversity in farming systems — which will be the inevitable result of continued reliance on a narrow portfolio of crops.
The revival of the African rice cultivar Oryza glaberrima is a good example of the potential benefits to be derived from making better use of non-commercial crops.

In the 1990s, researchers at WARDA (the African rice centre) began to screen their holdings of African rice cultivars. They had discovered that O. glaberrima had a number of agronomic properties that are valued by farmers who have limited access to agricultural inputs. Yet O. glaberrima was underutilised and endangered. This influenced the decision to hybridise O. glaberrima with Asian rice O. sativa. The aim was to capture the high yields of O. sativa but reduce unwanted characteristics like lodging and shattering while gaining the high stress-resistance of African glaberrima. The successful hybrids were released as NERICA (new rices for Africa) types.

Today, the NERICAs are being widely adopted by Africa's rice farmers. They are opening new opportunities for sustainable agricultural development, especially in rainfed environments."

Professor Shukla suggests that there is considerable of waste in the food chain and a reduction of this is needed.