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Community seed banks in China: achievements, challenges and prospects

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Title Community seed banks in China: achievements, challenges and prospects
 
Creator Song, Xin
Guanqi Li
Vernooy, Ronnie
Song, Yiching
 
Subject gene banks
conservation agriculture
diversification
community seed bank
resilience
seed systems
banco de genes
agricultura de conservación
diversificación
 
Description The rich agrobiodiversity of China is under unprecedented threat, experiencing a dramatic loss of many valuable local varieties and wild relatives of main crops. The country's formal conservation system of ex situ genebanks faces serious challenges to address this loss. Community seed banks can play a key role to complement the conservation activities of these genebanks and provide other important collective goods, such as evolutionary services, but although they have been around for some 35 years in various parts of the world, in China they have a much shorter history. In recent years though the number has increased to almost 30 in 2020, in particular due to the efforts of the China Farmers' Seed Network. The community seed banks in the country are very diverse in terms of functions and services, forms of management and institutional linkages. Compared to the most common functions of community seed banks in other countries, China is bringing an important design innovation through two new functions: adding value to seed and produce through innovative marketing strategies, and building regional and national seed system linkages and fostering collaboration. The review of community seed banking not only provides rich empirical evidence, but also makes an important contribution to theory. Building on the achievements of community seed banking in the last decade, there is scope to scale this kind of very valuable agrobiodiversity conservation approach through more effective uptake and support by relevant national policies.
 
Date 2021-04-29
2021-05-06T08:42:05Z
2021-05-06T08:42:05Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Song, X.; Li, G.; Vernooy, R.; Song, Y. (2021) Community seed banks in China: achievements, challenges and prospects. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 5: 630400. ISSN: 2571-581X
2571-581X
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/113645
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.630400
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-4.0
Open Access
 
Format 14 p.
application/pdf
 
Publisher Frontiers Media SA
 
Source Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems