Produce shelves are becoming sparser and featuring fewer options. Economic, cultural and environmental factors have reduced the variety of vegetables available to consumers. Prioritising the same produce can have negative health effects and could make crops more susceptible to climate change.
Vegetable diversity is “declining due to market homogenisation, land-use change and other threats”, and its “current conservation is insufficient”, said a study published in the journal PNAS. There have been “substantial declines in the range of traditional vegetable varieties grown over the past century, while almost one quarter of assessed wild relatives of major vegetable crops are threatened with extinction”, said a release by the World Vegetable Center about the study.
“Vegetable biodiversity is one of the world’s greatest assets for improving diets and adapting agriculture to a changing climate,” Colin Khoury, the global conservation lead at the crop diversity preservation non-profit Crop Trust, said in the release. “But we’re losing it at exactly the time we need it most.”
“The solution isn’t simply to grow more vegetables,” Dr Maarten van Zonneveld, who led the research, said in the release. “It’s also to grow more kinds of vegetables.” Many nutrient-rich vegetables – like “spider plant, slippery cabbage and other dark green leafy vegetables – receive little breeding attention due to their lower commercial value compared to crops such as pepper and tomato,” added the study.
The good news is that “much of the vegetable biodiversity we need is still out there”, said Zonneveld. The “urgency is to conserve it properly so that we can use it wisely to diversify diets amid climate change.” |
