Myth busting: Has modern agriculture really led to a 75% drop in crop diversity?

Colin Khoury | May 22, 2017 | Genetic Literacy Project

One of the central concepts that unifies those concerned with biodiversity is the belief that diversity is being lost, piece by piece, to a greater or lesser degree, globally.

The same goes for the biodiversity of what we eat. Scientists and activists have worried about the loss of crops and their many traditional varieties for at least a hundred years, since botanist N. I. Vavilov traveled the world in search of plants useful for cultivation in his Russian homeland. He noticed that diversity was disappearing in the cradles of agriculture – places where crops had been cultivated continuously for thousands of years. The alarm sounded even louder 50 years ago, during the Green Revolution, when farmers in some of the most diverse regions of the world largely replaced their many locally adapted wheat, rice, and other grain varieties with fewer, more uniform, higher yielding professionally bred varieties.......To Read More.....