There was a native mango tree in the front yard of our home that my father bought for the family in the mid-1970s. He had retired from government service and had returned to Thrissur. It was a big, sprawling tree which bore copious fruits every year. When the mangoes were small, tender and clustered in bunches, my mother had them plucked for pickle. As they ripened, she turned the fibrous fruits with tough skins into a sweet curry, which we poured on to our rice and ate at lunch. 

We had to cut the mango tree in the early years of our stay in that house. We realised soon enough that though the tree was in our compound, it was perceived more as a local public property. Youngsters threw stones to make the mangoes drop, to pick the fruits. Their aim missed most of the time and the casualty was a broken roof tile in our home. And we could not afford replacing roof tiles ever so often. 

I do not know if the mango tree was of the Chandrakaran variety that researcher Femi Benny wrote about. Needless to say, the stories about native varieties disappearing and giving way to market-friendlier varieties are talked about very often. Almost all old families in Kerala will recite names in Malayalam that described the fruit appropriately. For instance, one native mango variety was called Tholikayappan, which means bitter mango skin. 

The story that many elderly would mention is that many of these varieties are disappearing or have disappeared from homestead gardens. Instead, they have been replaced with the popular varieties bred by the agricultural universities. 

The story of disappearance of native varieties is not limited only to mangoes. It is a universal post-Green Revolution story across all food and horticultural crops. When the world pushed to increase farm productivity and production to keep pace with the population burgeoning after the Second World War, agricultural research institutions picked a few varieties in every crop that were amenable to crop breeding and improvement work. The varieties — whether for mangoes, rice, wheat or pigeonpea — that were not selected got neglected, and slowly disappeared. 

In the new world order after the War, along with the institutional backbone for finance and trade, another network of international agricultural institutions was created to strengthen crop production through research, so that food insecurity does not cause another world conflict. The first focus was on the improving staple food crops — wheat and maize that fed the Americas and Europe through research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico; and rice that fed Asia through the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Their work was successful in winning the Nobel Peace Prize for wheat researcher Norman Borlaug in 1970. 

In India, the national agricultural research establishment used these improved varieties to launch the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s, which in turn made the country self-sufficient in food crops. It also created the template for crop improvement research for other agricultural and horticultural crops. 

Frozen and stored

During the past 60 to 70 years, scientific crop breeding has meant looking at native varieties that have qualities that can increase productivity and combine them with those that have better pest and disease resistance. Climate resilience is a trait that has come into demand in the past two decades.

While this meant repeated breeding activities using a few selected varieties that had the needed traits, the other varieties got neglected. Even though the neglected varieties were not propagated or promoted, the research establishment — both global and national — did not throw their seeds away, lest they be of use sometime in the future. They were frozen to -20 degrees and stored in genebanks. 

National agricultural research systems established their own repositories for food plants and fisheries. Having worked and collected seeds from multiple countries, the international network of agricultural research institutions had the biggest genebanks. 

In the years before 1992, there was no limitation to accessing seeds from any part of the world and storing it in a genebank, because genetic resources were considered as global commons. However, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity changed that. Biological diversity became a sovereign property. For instance, India has sovereign right over a biological species or variety endemic to the country, and thus accessing it for a global genebank would require permission from the national government. 

This meant that there was a need to develop a mechanism to ensure that the genetic material collected during the ‘global commons’ regime was used judiciously, and with equitable sharing of benefits to those countries from where it came, and communities that conserved them. An International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was adopted in 2001 for this. Under this treaty, the 700,000 accessions in the international network are being held under trust as global public goods.

The challenge, however, was not collecting seeds, which could be done through collaborations and exchanges, but keeping the buildings in which the seeds were stored safe. The International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas lived through that threat. Located in Aleppo in Syria, their genebank was severely damaged in the country’s protracted civil war. The centre managed to duplicate most of its accessions in the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. 

Also nicknamed the Doomsday Vault, the Global Seed Vault was inaugurated in 2008 by Nobel Prize winner environmentalist Wangari Maathai and the Norwegian prime minister. The idea was to design this secure vault under the permafrost of the Arctic Circle, so that freezing temperatures are maintained naturally and thus the storage facility was independent from the vicissitudes of power outages.

But the changing climate had other plans. In 2017, the permafrost melted and the seed bank was flooded. Fortunately, the collection survived without damage. 

A recipe book with a difference

Storing agricultural biological diversity in ex situ facilities such as genebanks is only part of the conservation story. The more important conservation happens in villages and agricultural fields where farmers and communities have not only been continuously conserving the diversity in situ but also through their cooking recipes.

An unlikely group of young men and women, working with a group called Karya, recently developed a rather atypical recipe book. The process through which they stumbled upon the idea of developing the book — From Hands that Feed — is more interesting than the book itself. 

There are counterintuitive reasons. The search by young professionals at the cutting edge — developing AI models — gets blended with traditional knowledge. Two, the research into languages goes into recipe and cooking.  

The Karya group works on developing artificial intelligence that is inclusive of the marginal groups and communities whose voices are left out in the data-sieving process that mainstream AI models do. To this effect, they were looking at the lesser-known languages of eastern and northeast Indian states — Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur. They came across lesser-known crops and local recipes when they were field-studying 10 languages from these states — Sadri, Santhali, Ho, Khortha, Mundari, Meitei, Bodo, Khasi, Kaman Mishmi and Assamese.

They did not bring members of these Indigenous communities to urban studios to record them cooking, but followed them into their cooking spaces, photographed the process at every stage and recorded it as a recipe sheet. Each recipe was credited to the person cooking, and all their 314 names were listed in the book. In the process speciality rice and pulse varieties, millets, leaves, flowers, fruits, vegetables, meat and even red ants were listed. Karya officials say that in addition to payment for the time, the proceeds from the sale of the book will also be shared.

Sharing benefits with equity

Biological diversity without its associated traditional knowledge of its use is of no utilitarian value. The turmeric on every Indian kitchen shelf does not announce itself as having antiseptic properties. Grandmothers’ wisdom gives that information.

In that sense, when the group of young professionals searching to optimise AI for lesser-known Indian languages started documenting relatively unknown crops and recipes, they were supporting the conservation of both the biological diversity and its traditional knowledge. 

The promise is that they are not alone. There are other young professionals, either working individually or in groups, to promote the conservation and use of lesser-known agricultural biodiversity. After all, only when the diversity of foods and the associated traditional knowledge bring in money would it be of value to those conserving it. 

There are chefs bringing these ingredients on to the table; entrepreneurs who work on bringing out the food traditions of communities that live in remote locations, such as the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh; groups that organise specialised food festivals; and others who organise seed festivals for the unique environment of the Wayanad plateau. 

The success story is of Kadaknath chicken, a native fowl from Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh. The locally-popular variety was not only conserved, but through concerted action of multiple groups a Geographical Indicator (GI) tag was obtained for it in 2018, thereby providing protection for the community knowledge. 

Finding the economic connect

India was one of the earliest countries that worked towards developing a Biodiversity Act that formalised into national law the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992. The Convention was a watershed not only for declaring biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge as sovereign property, but also for introducing the principles of conservation of biodiversity, promoting its sustainable use, and ensuring equitable benefit sharing with the communities that had conserved the resource and the associated knowledge. 

Policymaking institutions and commercial enterprise embraced with alacrity the first two principles — conservation of biological diversity and promoting its sustainable use. The third principle — equitable sharing of benefits — did not get the required attention. 

Even though a recent report by the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) talks about successes in access and benefit sharing, the thrust of the framework is to help with the ease of doing business. An example projected as a success in the NBA report notes that 0.5% of the earnings of a company from a resource was shared with the community. There was a similar lack of alacrity in establishing biodiversity management committees within the rural and urban panchayats, till the time the NBA was ordered by the National Green Tribunal. 

Finding the right price for the resource and its traditional knowledge is the crux in access and benefit sharing. If the resource is underpriced, then communities will extract more to get fair value. If the resource is overpriced, like Cordyceps or the caterpillar fungus from the Himalayas, then it tends to be overexploited. 

In a political environment that gives greater value to commercial interests rather than of conservator-communities, benefit sharing gets neglected. The same can be seen in the case of the draft new seed bill made public at the end of 2025. It continues with the theme of ease of doing business, and is more seed industry friendly than farmer friendly. 

The direction of the political environment is clear. However, the challenges that the food systems would need to overcome in a changing climate is not clear. The reliability with which rainfall, dry season, heat, frost and snow appear over the Indian subcontinent is changing, and every year is a new syllabus for the Indian farmer. 

Even with molecular methods that have hastened crop breeding, the research world is likely to remain two steps behind the ever-changing realities on the farms. The Indian farmers would need in their armoury the entire diversity of crop varieties — preserved and stored in genebanks, and conserved and selected in farmers’ fields — to deal with new combination of stresses that their crops face every year. It could be the Chandrakaran or the Tholikayappan protecting the mango crop one particularly bad season. 

The promise is that when young professionals and citizens’ groups work to bring out, conserve and record India’s food diversity, their voices can have a greater impact. After all, since the 1990s the urban middle class has played a greater role in the country’s political and policy decisions.

Banner image: A farmer cleans maize seeds near a paddy field on the outskirts of Guwahati, Assam. Representative image. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

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S. Gopikrishna Warrier Editor

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AgricultureBiodiversityFoodOrganic FarmingPlantationsPlantsIndia

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