Wild Relatives of Important Food Crops Are Facing Extinction
Agriculture and pesticide use are to blame, a new study finds.
Wild relatives of some of the world’s most important agricultural crops such as corn, beans and potatoes are important to future food security. But many of them are facing extinction, a new study finds.
Most of the staple foods we eat today come from domesticated plants. Crop wild relatives—defined as a plant species occurring in the wild that is closely related to a domesticated crop—are vital resources for plant breeders aiming to develop new varieties to better withstand heat, drought and pests. They’ve been used to breed new varieties of drought-resistant beans, higher-yielding varieties of corn and blight-resistant potatoes. Wild relatives of crops are only going to become more important as climate change progresses, forcing crop yields to drop as average temperatures rise.
In an effort to measure their decline, researchers studied nine different kinds of crop wild relatives that originated in the Mesoamerican region, consisting of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. In total, they analyzed 224 plants closely related to corn, beans, potato, squash, chili peppers, vanilla, avocado, husk tomatoes and cotton. Their results, published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, found that 35 percent of those crop wild relatives were threatened with extinction according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. Wild relatives of crops such as bananas, apples, prunes and ginger also appear on that list.
All eight wild varieties of vanilla studied are listed as endangered or critically endangered. Researchers also found that 92 percent of cotton and 60 percent of avocado species are also threatened, as well as nearly a third of bean species. About a quarter of wild potato species are also facing extinction. Many are dying out due to overfarming and pesticide usage, the study found.
Earlier this week, the researchers presented their findings at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, held once every four years with the goal of conserving the environment and harnessing solutions to global challenges. Bárbara Goettsch, lead author of the research article, says that crop wild relatives are key to breeding more resilient crops that will be able to adapt to extreme weather and other threats. She added that wild relatives of crops need to be better represented in gene banks. Otherwise, the future of these crops remains uncertain.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Wild Relatives of Important Food Crops Are Facing Extinction
by Shelby Vittek, Modern Farmer
September 8, 2021
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
This should be the most important thing for us to work on to keep so we’ll have something to eat later in life. The people don’t even know how to get pollinated and they’re killing the beast like crazy here in the United States I’m trying to feed the bees the best I can. They don’t realize if you don’t have the beach you don’t have the pollination you don’t have the food.