Italy supports Bioversity International’s on-farm conservation research

With additional generous support from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Development Cooperation, in December 2013, Bioversity International has received a boost in support for research on conservation of crop diversity on farm and in the wild and the economics of agricultural biodiversity conservation.

“This financial support contributes to making changes in smallholder farmers’ lives and enabling others to do so too. The long-term impact is to boost people’s livelihoods, whilst preserving nature for future generations,” said Bioversity Director General, M. Ann Tutwiler.
The contribution will support research into three important questions:

• When and how do rural people conserve biodiversity in agricultural systems, and how can we help them to do so?
• How can we measure, monitor and prioritize for conservation actions the vast amounts of crop diversity found in the world?
• How can we identify which distant relatives of crops, growing wild, are most likely to contain useful traits for breeding new varieties, needed in new circumstances like increased drought conditions?

To enable smallholder farmers to conserve biodiversity and to do so in a cost-effective manner, Bioversity is researching new valuation methods, economic decision-support tools and incentive mechanisms. This work involves identifying and valuing the benefits that result when farmers maintain agricultural biodiversity (e.g. more resilient production systems; options for adapting to climate change; maintaining landscapes and local culture). We are exploring new policies and incentives that motivate farmers to undertake conservation activites for the benefit of broader society. Innovative applications of agricultural biodiversity-focused payments for ecosystem services are being applied in Latin America, Asia and Europe. Other, non-market, valuation tools have been applied to developing conservation strategy recommendations for threatened Italian cattle breeds.

The second crucial area of work supported by Italy’s contribution will be developing an innovative farmer-participatory methodology to assess the state of on-farm agricultural biodiversity in a number of key CGIAR Research Program sites. Methodologies for prioritizing and monitoring the diversity of crops and their wild relatives will be applied to successfully conserve them in situ, in the context of climate change and a growing human population.

Crop wild relatives, which are wild plant species related to cultivated crops, are a key resource for productive and sustainable agroecosystems. A third exciting area of research is related to developing smart ways to identify useful traits in crop wild relatives without having to screen the entire population. We are producing guidelines to share our knowledge with others and benefit more people.

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Bioversity International is a research-for-development organization that provides scientific evidence of the role that on-farm and wild agricultural and forest biodiversity can play in a more nutritious, resilient, productive and adaptable food and agricultural system. Bioversity International is a member of the CGIAR Consortium