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    "headline": "FAO says 75% of crop genetic diversity vanished since 1900; Svalbard’s vault guards 1.36 million samples",
    "description": "The FAO says about 75% of crop plant genetic diversity has been lost since 1900 as farmers dropped local varieties for uniform seeds.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-11T09:13:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Crop diversity, Food and Agriculture Organization, Landrace, Svalbard Global Seed Vault",
    "articleBody": "Roughly three-quarters of the genetic diversity in the world’s crop plants has disappeared since the 1900s, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The loss happened as farmers everywhere swapped their many local varieties and landraces for a smaller set of genetically uniform, high-yielding ones. The FAO figure, about 75 percent, appears in the agency’s material on agrobiodiversity, which cites FAO data from 1999. The same material goes further on one measure: more than 90 percent of crop varieties have vanished from farmers’ fields. What was lost A landrace is a local crop type that farmers have selected and replanted over generations, adapted to one valley’s soil, one region’s droughts or one community’s cooking. Each carries its own mix of genes for things like disease resistance, heat tolerance or flavor. When a farmer abandons it for a commercial variety, those genes go too, unless someone has saved the seed. The FAO says the main driver, reported by almost every country, is the replacement of local varieties by improved or exotic ones. It also points to the spread of industrial and Green Revolution farming, monocultures, and a more uniform global food market that favors fewer varieties and breeds. How narrow the menu has become The agency’s figures show how few plants now feed the world: Humans know of 250,000 to 300,000 edible plant species but use only 150 to 200. Three crops, rice, maize and wheat, supply nearly 60 percent of the calories and protein people get from plants. About 75 percent of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species. Run the numbers and the narrowing is stark. Even taking the high end, 200 species in use out of the low-end estimate of 250,000 edible ones, people rely on less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the edible plants available. Livestock follow the same path: the FAO says 30 percent of breeds are at risk of extinction, with six breeds lost every month. Why it matters Uniform fields are productive but fragile. A single pest or disease that breaks one variety’s defenses can sweep across millions of identical plants. The genes to fight back often sit in exactly the old landraces that farmers stopped growing. Breeders working on new crops, from hardier grains to high-yield black walnut cultivars in Missouri, depend on that stored variety. The backup in the Arctic The best-known safety net is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, cut 130 meters into a sandstone mountain on Norway’s Spitsbergen island. It opened on February 26, 2008, keeps seeds at minus 18 degrees Celsius, and as of June 2025 held 1,355,591 samples, duplicates of seed stored in gene banks around the world. It has been used for real. After the war in Syria cut off a gene bank at Tel Hadya, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas withdrew backup seeds in 2015 and again in 2017, grew them out in Lebanon and Morocco, and rebuilt its collections. Smaller depositors matter too: Peru’s Parque de la Papa sent 750 potato samples in 2015, and the Cherokee Nation added nine heirloom crop samples in 2020, a first for any US tribe. The vault has room for 4.5 million samples, so it is roughly 30 percent full. Conservationists face the same race with wild plants, such as the Wollemi pine, with just 46 adult trees left in the wild. Limits The 75 percent figure is an estimate, and the FAO itself notes that few systematic studies of crop genetic erosion have been made, even though nearly all countries report it as a serious problem. The number also measures diversity lost from farms, not necessarily from existence: some of it survives in gene banks. Seed banks preserve samples but not the farming knowledge that kept landraces alive. In 2026 the Svalbard vault received the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation. Further reading Wikipedia: Svalbard Global Seed Vault Image: Cierra Martin for Crop Trust, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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