Agrobiodiversity: The living library

The world has more than 50,000 edible plants. But 90% of the world's energy demands are fulfilled by just 15 crops, according to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Dependency on a handful of crops is problematic. In cultivating countless generations of a few staples, we have inadvertently lost some of their most valuable properties. This review paper shows that wild-crop relatives look set to be a part of the answer to the food-insecurity problem, whether they are used to form new crops or growers simply make better use of the neglected crops already available to them.