Participatory conservation: a means of encouraging community biodiversity

Abstract

The conservation of natural resources and biodiversity is threatened by increasing habitat loss, the degradation of the environment and the introduction of modern crop varieties. Although local landraces and crop varieties are potential sources of valuable genes that could benefit the farming community, their conservation depends to a large extent on the personal motivation of farmers and the continuation of traditional farming methods. There is growing apprehension that many landraces and site-specific genetic resources could be lost. Trait expression in these genetic resources is highly dependent upon the local environment, and has evolved over a long period of time through traditional and cultural cropping practices. Such varieties should be conserved in situ preferably on-farm. Techniques for their conservation, seed maintenance and regeneration can be fine-tuned and efficiently applied if farmer knowledge is reinforced with formal theory. Increasingly attention is being focused on participatory conservation to provide a synergy between formal-sector and farmer approaches. This paper describes how landraces and local crop varieties could be conserved by the use of field gene banks and area gene banks linked to community gene banks, and through these, to a national gene bank. Improved breeding strategies, resulting from a farmer- formal sector synergy, offer more options for providing a secure and sustainable livelihood for the large numbers of poor farmers who at present receive little or no assistance from the formal sector.