Biodiversity Conservation for Agriculture, Nutrition and Health in an Era of Climate Change

At a time when it seemed that continued availability of biodiversity in general, and agro-biodiversity in particular was taken for granted, one of us (MSS) as early as January 1983 in his Presidential address at the 15th International Congress of Genetics¹, held in New Delhi drew attention of the delegates to the importance of conservation of biodiversity of all organisms from ‘microbes to man’. More than fifty years ago, it had occurred only to a few geneticists that there would be no plant breeding at all, whether molecular or Mendelian, should all the wild progenitors and related species of the cultivated crops become extinct.