On-farm Conservation-Initiatives by NBPGR in the Western Himalayan Region

摘要

Large number of plant genetic resources have been collected and conserved ex situ in the gene banks, the world over. These genetic resources have been effectively used for breeding new crop varieties and enhancing food production. While doing so, thevery important form of conservation in situ (on-farm), which has resulted into large ex situ collections, received less attention and lots of valuable materials were lost from farmer's field. On-farm conservation has been recognized as a participatory and dynamic approach involving farmers and their long established skills and knowledge on genetic resources. Being dynamic, it makes continuum in the evolutionary processes, thereby create useful genetic variability within traditional agricultural systems(Brush, 1999; Bisht et al, 2006). It also supports large number of rare alleles and genotypes evolved spatially and temporally than the accessions conserved in the gene banks (Jarvis et al., 2008). These rare combinations of new alleles are capable to cope with wide variety of stresses and have been reviewed in detail (Oldfield and Alcorn 1987; Iwanaga 1995; Maxted et al, 1997a,b; Brush and Meng 1998; Sthapit et al, 2008).