Crop wild relatives: know how past and present to improve future research, conservation and utilization strategies, especially in Italy: a review

Crop wild relatives (CWR) have contributed to crop domestication for millennia, but nowadays due also to human overexploitation of plants and other environmental resources they are threatened and hence they need protection to guarantee plant evolution and food supply for future human generations. At the moment, definition and identification of CWR inside plant community is made according to the taxon group and the gene pool concepts. The number of CWR identified by the taxon group concept (broad sense) is much larger than the one identified by the gene pool concept (narrow sense), which means that only a very small percentage of the CWR identified with the former concept can be used by breeders. In Italy there are 1400 endemic vascular plants, of which 70 are CWR in the broad sense and 10 in the narrow sense. The status of in situ and ex situ conservation of CWR understood in the narrow sense is presented and discussed, stressing the point that conservation and utilization is not a scientific problem, but a political one.