EIP-AGRI Focus Group on Genetic resources: Starting Paper

This is a starting paper of an EIP-AGRI Focus Group on Genetic resources. Agricultural genetic resources have an enormous contribution to make in addressing the food and nutrition security, while ensuring resilience of the production systems, and in coping with the impacts of climate change in the future. Face to an important loss of agricultural genetic diversity and variability due to modern agricultural practices (use of mainstream varieties and breeds) there is the need to reverse this trend.The purpose of this paper is to serve as an input to the first meeting of the EIP-AGRI Focus Group on Genetic Resources, whose main task is to analyse existing co-operation models.