ABSTRACT
The seed of varieties that is selected, propagated and stored on-farm still represents the bulk of crop diversity that is available and utilized worldwide today. However, this is less and less the case in western Europe. Fifty years of direct or indirect public subsidies that promoted quantity over quality in agricultural production, and encouraged the use of modern industrial inputs to meet those quantities, have resulted in the use of only a handful of elite varieties of just a few crops, by a dominant group of large-scale farmers. As such, these farmers have abandoned the broad diversity of local varieties that are adapted to local and low-input agriculture and that require labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive production systems.
