The Italian landrace conservation strategy

In Italy, as in most of the countries of Europe, a rapid decline of agro-biodiversity is taking place, the decline is due mainly to a series of economic and institutional factors. In addition, traditional crop varieties, generally known as ‘landraces’ (LR) were rapidly and widely substituted by modern varieties in the past. However they have been continuously maintained by people within their local biological, cultural and socio-economic context and are an important fraction of agro biodiversity. Those countries which are signatories of both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Treaty have an obligation and responsibility for landrace conservation. The EC FPVII ‘PGR Secure project’ aimed at developing conservation strategies for European crop wild relative and landrace diversity and to enhance their use as a mean of underpinning European food security in the face of climate change. The Italian strategy for landrace conservation was worked out as recommendations for actions to be taken in the next future by considering the present constrains to conservation, as they emerged from the data gathered during PGR Secure and from the exam of the international and national context and of the available literature.