conservation à la ferme

CONT: Over the past decades, a commendable effort to conserve crop diversity has resulted in the establishment of more than 1,700 genebanks around the world that safeguard over 7.4 million crop samples. These valuable ex situ conservation efforts must be complemented, however, by parallel actions that encourage the maintenance of crop diversity in farmers' fields and enhance its use to unleash its nutrition, livelihood and sustainability benefits. On-farm conservation enables the continuation of dynamic processes of crop adaptation to shifts in the environmental and socio-cultural context and also facilitates the preservation of knowledge that is essential to the cultural valorization of the crops.