ABSTRACT
Most of the poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and well-being. A key livelihood asset that they maintain is their agrobiodiversity, which is made up of their crops, varieties and forest species. Improving the use of agrobiodiversity through enhanced understanding and better management offers opportunities to advance the well-being of small-scale farmers by providing more sustainable production systems, better nutrition and enhanced income opportunities (Jarvis et al., 2011). In the past, the world invested many resources in collecting and conserving farmers’ varieties of the major food crops for future use by plant breeders, rather than developing mechanisms to make local biodiversity accessible to poor and needy people. Many small-scale farmers in marginal areas have not yet benefited from the investments and great successes in modern plant breeding (Bellon, 2006). Various methods that together shape participatory crop improvement (PCI) have been developed in recent decades with the aim of meeting those farmers’ needs (Sthapit et al., 1996; Witcombe et al., 1996; Ceccarelli et al., 2009). However, most PCI methods do not assess the usefulness of plant genetic resources (PGR) that are easily available to farmers in the form of local varieties or semi-domesticated species before launching conventional breeding schemes with elements of farmer participation.
