Tapping the untapped potential of agrobiodiversity for food and nutritional security

Today, under these changing climatic conditions and increasing environmental pressure to sustain the evergrowing population and ensure their food and nutritional security is a sustainability issue. Therefore, to tackle this major sustainability issue, managing, conserving, and popularizing agrobiodiversity is of paramount importance. Agrobiodiversity is the variety and variability of agriculturally relevant organisms, a major subset of biodiversity. Agrobiodiversity plays a multifaceted role in the ecosystem. It ensures increased productivity even in a fragile or degraded ecosystem. Agrobiodiversity enhances the sustainability of the agricultural system, making it more stable and robust. It also promotes the shift from a mono-cropping system to a diversified cropping system, which ensures food and nutritional security in marginalized communities. The indigenous people play a key role in maintaining and conserving agrobiodiversity with the traditional and biocultural knowledge that they hold through intergenerational and intragenerational transfers of knowledge. Agrobiodiversity plays a key role in harbouring genetic diversity, which is a gold mine for crop improvement programs. There are several ways of conserving agrobiodiversity broadly, as ex-situ and in-situ, and through the promotion of j udicious use of agrobiodiversity.