ABSTRACT
Among criticisms of the Green Revolution is the process of ‘genetic erosion’, which refers to the reduction of genetic variation within major crops and the loss of other crops and is assumed to lead to an increased risk of crop failure and malnutrition. The perception of genetic erosion as a threat is a major issue in public debates on agricultural modernization, as in, for instance, Shiva (1993). Intuitively, the replacement of a variety of landraces of traditional crops with improved varieties of a few, major crops will carry the risk of genetic erosion. However, agro-biodiversity dynamics is a complex field with many unknowns when it comes to firm data. While India’s report on agro-biodiversity to FAO (NBPGR 2007, p. 17) states that ‘Many of the landraces and primitive cultivars have already vanished and some are on the verge of it due to their abandonment by farmers in lieu of high yielding varieties. The remaining ones are genetically deteriorating
gradually due to hybridization, selection or genetic drift’, the global report (FAO 2010, p. 16) is more cautiously noting that ‘it seems that general statements purporting to quantify the overall amount of genetic erosion that has occurred over the past decade are not warranted’.
