Crop biodiversity plays a part in our everyday life; it can be found in our food, our daily needs (clothes, medicine, materials) and our surroundings (interior and garden plants).

Crop biodiversity is the product of a long process of domestication and breeding whereby we adapt plants to our needs: disease resistance, yield, flavour, medicinal qualities, aesthetic quality, dyeing quality, craft, and so on. This wealth of existing varieties, species, and crop wild relatives is a reservoir that we can continue to draw from in order to meet new challenges. It is vital that we conserve, characterise, and diffuse these resources, commonly known as Plant Genetic Resources (PGR).