Revisit to definitions and need for inventorization or registration of landrace, folk, farmers' and traditional varieties

摘要

In recent times, certain definitions related with landraces, folk varieties, farmers varie-ties, traditional varieties are causing con-fusion. This situation has arisen because of inconsistencies and lack of agreement among the agriculture/plant scientists re-garding their definition, while dealing with same or different material(s). Further, the recent legislations, namely Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Right (PPVFR) Act~1 2001 and Biological Diver-sity Act~2 2002 also define them with apurpose of protection of farmers' rights and benefit sharing. Therefore, there is a necessity to properly understand and de-fine them with consistency based on cer-tain genetic principles. There have been no genetic guidelines for consistent clas-sification of such related taxa and the people are not refraining from adding to the appalling list of terms in the litera-ture. We propose here a genetic focus for the terms already in use. It is important for countries like India belonging to old civilizations where first domestication of many plant species occurred and the lo-cals/farmers contributed significantly in the evolution of agriculture and agricul-tural products. This would help in en-forcement of above legislations in the right spirit and empowerment of farmers to enable protection of their rights and en-sure benefit sharing to farmers or farming communities, accruing from the com-mercialization of products developed us-ing their basic products and knowledge, as envisaged by the Convention on Biolo-ical Diversity.