This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of crop varieties around the world. This biodiversity protected agriculture from crop losses caused by plant diseases and climate change. Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources…
