Cradle of Creativity: The Case for In Situ Conservation of Agro-Biodiversity and the Role of Traditional Knowledge and IPRs
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Date
2003
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Abstract
"Agro-biodiversity in any specific ecological context emerges through the interaction among human preferences, natural selection pressures and larger social and institutional considerations. There are major catastrophic events such as droughts, severe floods and other natural calamities which might lead to not only extraordinary changes in the agro-biodiversity conditions or the local agro ecological characteristics but also to major migrations. The intermingling of agricultural biodiversity from different regions has gone on for millennia. Human preferences have played a prominent role in selection but many times in highly ecologically stressed regions, the selection was made by nature and human beings adapted to whatever seeds or plants which survived. It will be useful therefore in any study of agro-biodiversity to look at the pattern in the use of agro-biodiversity within the variable field conditions as influenced by medium or long term agro-ecological changes. Such studies would require a longitudinal or a long term monitoring or agro-biodiversity for which we have not had any institutional infrastructure created in the country. This is perhaps the only study where we had the opportunity to revisit the same region after a interval of 10 years to see the changes at plot and sub plot level in the preferences of farmers as influenced by agro project conditions."
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conservation, biodiversity, agriculture, traditional knowledge, ecology