Mauricio Bellon: Crop Evolution Under Domestication

Crop evolution under domestication is a process that continues today in many parts of the Global South for numerous crops, driven by smallholder farmers growing native varieties of crops. They provide an "evolutionary" service to society by sustaining crop evolution that generates the broad and novel genetic variation necessary for crops to adapt to change, fundamental to achieve sustainable agricultural and food systems.

Current agricultural development strategies and related policies sponsored by international and national development and research organizations, as well as private companies, are based on promoting higher crop productivity while discouraging crop evolution. In this talk, Gund MacMillan Scholar in Residence Mauricio Bellon discusses the need to rethink these strategies to find the right balance between high crop productivity and the delivery of evolutionary services to agriculture and food systems.

Mauricio R. Bellon is an independent scientist and Honorary Fellow at the National Commission for the Use and Knowledge of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Mexico. He received his MS and PhD in ecology from the University of California, Davis and his undergraduate degree in agronomy from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. His research focuses on the reasons, incentives and dynamics of crop diversity in agricultural systems-both at the inter-specific and infra-specific levels-in the developing world.

Previously, Mauricio was Coordinator of Studies on Agrobiodiversity at CONABIO. Before this he was Principal Scientist and Programme Director, Diversity for Livelihoods Programme, at Bioversity International (Italy). He also has worked for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, Mexico), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, The Philippines) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Science.

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