Plant specialists at the Royal botanical Gardens at Kew this week welcomed the first findings from a major new research project, which they claim will help efforts to adapt staple foods including rice, wheat and potato to cope with the effects of climate change.

The project is part of a larger push for greater crop diversity, the importance of which is only gradually being appreciated, tracked the whereabouts of the 'wild cousins' of a number of the World's most important staple crops. These relations, it is believed, could provide beneficial qualities to increase production, boost disease resistance or tolerate greater environmental stresses in agricultural crops.

However, agricultural diversity has shrunk massively in recent decades and policy groups are only now beginning to understand the seriousness of the situation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has been at the forefront of moves to convey the importance of healthy genetic variety in agriculture, both in livestock and crops.

The initiative is being led by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is seeking to conserve and support plant 'genetic resources' around the world. The Crop Trust claims agricultural diversity is "one of the world's least recognized but most valuable resources," and maintains that the different traits of individual crop varieties form the "raw material for improving and adapting crops to meet all future challenges,"  such as providing drought or heat tolerance, greater nutrition or resistance to emerging disease threats.

The Trust is leading a ten-year initiative to conserve these wild relatives of agricultural crops, to preserve their essential traits that could be bred into crops to make them more hardy and versatile. Kew's Millennium Seed Bank and the Norwegian government are also backing the initiative, which has been broken down into a number of smaller projects.

The first such project, a three-year assessment of conservation gaps for crops' 'wild relatives' around the world, has been completed and now scientists will attempt to collect and study these plants. Beginning this summer, efforts will be focused on countries in Australia, South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru) and East Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique), though countries in other global regions will also be studied as part of the research, including Portugal, Cyprus and Italy in Europe.

In the UK, crop wild relatives of apple, carrot and the fodder crops, alfafa and vetch will be studied and collected for preservation. Worldwide, aubergine, potato, apple, sunflower and carrot were deemed to be most at risk by the study's authors, as a large number of their wild relatives are threatened.

Kew researchers said the collections and further study beginning this year will focus on priority species which are under threat from habitat loss. However, 54 percent of wild relatives listed for study are listed as being 'high priority for collection' as they are threatened, have not been collected before, or current collections do not reflect their distribution.

The situation appears to be bleak; according to the FAO, the world's agricultural biodiversity shrank by 75 percent over the 20th Century. In India, 30,000 traditional varieties of rice were grown sixty years ago, but these have shrunk drastically; now just ten varieties account for over 75 percent of production. In the United States, 75 percent of potato production stems from just four closely related varieties.  

Nevertheless, the Crop Trust researchers and their colleagues remain hopeful that their goal is achievable. Andy Jarvis of the Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which led the first three year study of the Trust's project, said "This is a major step forward in the global effort to make our food crops more resilient to the effects of climate change. Crop wild relatives are a potential treasure trove of useful characteristics that scientists can put to good use for making agriculture more resilient and improving the livelihoods of millions of people."

Jane Toll, Project Manager at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, added, "This study has thrown up some surprises. Crop wild relatives in some areas in Australia, Europe and the USA need to be collected just as much as those in regions of Africa, Asia and South America. We want to ensure access to the wild genes that could boost the crops relied on by some of the world's poorest people. These wild genes have the potential to increase yields, pest resistance and tolerance to extreme temperatures."