Abstract
Biodiversity in general, and agrobiodiversity in particular are crucial for adaptation to climate change, for resilience and for human health as related to dietary diversity. Participatory plant breeding (PPB) has been promoted for its advantages to increase selection efficiency, variety adoption and farmers’ empowerment, and for being more socially equitable and gender responsive than conventional plant breeding. In this review paper we concentrate on one specific benefit of PPB, namely, increasing agrobiodiversity by describing how the combination of decentralized selection with the collaboration of farmers is able to address the diversity of agronomic environments, which is likely to increase because of the location specificity of climate change. Therefore, while PPB has been particularly suited to organic agriculture, in light of the increasing importance of climate change, it should also be considered as a breeding opportunity for conventional agriculture.
Highlights
Biodiversity in general, and agrobiodiversity in particular are crucial for adaptation to climate change, for resilience and for human health as related to dietary diversity
In this review paper we concentrate on one specific benefit of Participatory plant breeding (PPB), namely, increasing agrobiodiversity by describing how the combination of decentralized selection with the collaboration of farmers is able to address the diversity of agronomic environments, which is likely to increase because of the location specificity of climate change
While PPB has been suited to organic agriculture, in light of the increasing importance of climate change, it should be considered as a breeding opportunity for conventional agriculture
Summary
Plant breeding has followed the changes in global food systems shifting towards a reduced number of crops [15], with markets’ preference for uniformity and standardization [16], becoming one of the major drivers of climate change, land-use change and biodiversity loss [17]. In other words, it is the requirements of industrial cultivation, husbandry and processing (and to some extent consumer demand) that determine the breeding objectives rather than nutritional value, taste, improved stress resistance or adaptation to natural conditions [18].
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