ABSTRACT
Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA) are strategic goods for crop breeding through farmer selection, conventional plant breeding and modern bio-technological techniques. Crop improvement enables their adaptation to biotic and environmental changes as well as the development of new foods and new uses. Currently, all countries depend in great measure on the PGRFA resources of plants domesticated, and subsequently developed, in other countries or regions for their food and sustainable agricultural development (Kloppenburg and Kleinman, 1987; Gepts, 2004). Even the world centres of crop diversity (Vavilov, 1926; Zeven and de Wet, 1982), which coincide with the centres of domestication, mostly rely on non-indigenous crop genetic resources to meet their food needs (Gepts, 2004). In her study of the regions, Ximena Flores Palacios (1998) showed that the southwest Asian centre of agricultural origin uses non-indigenous crops for 30 per cent of its production, while the Latin American and Chinese centres employ 60 per cent of their non-indigenous crops for their production. Furthermore, the new conditions that will be imposed by a changing climate will require that plant breeders and farmers have access to an even greater genetic diversity to attempt to adapt to the novel situations (Fujisaka et al., 2009).
