Dealing with farmers’ Ethnolinguistic differences when collecting crop diversity on-farm

Abstract

Identification and characterization of the farmers’ named crop varieties cultivated around the world is a major issue for conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources. Intraspecific diversity is strongly determined by farmers’ socio-cultural environment, but this has little been documented. In this paper, we tested, on a contact zone among three ethnolinguistic groups located on the Mount Kenya region, whether farmers’ socio-cultural differences have an impact on the morphological characteristics of the farmers’ named sorghum varieties. Eighteen qualitative morphological traits of the panicles were measured. We first compared the morphological diversity of the named varieties among ethnolinguistic groups using multivariate analysis of homogeneity of groups’ dispersion and tested their differentiation using permutational multivariate analysis of variance. Discriminant analysis of principal components was then used to categorize the morphological diversity withouta priori, and this classification was compared with farmers’ local taxonomy (vernacular names) in the three ethnolinguistic groups. Our results show that some morphotypes are peculiar to some ethnolinguistic groups and that a morphotype can bear different variety names while the same variety name can be used to identify different morphotypes. Morphological differentiation that was explained by ethnolinguistic groups was higher for local landraces than for improved varieties. Our findings imply that socio-cultural diversity of farmers and the criteria they use to identify and maintain landraces need to be considered in studying and sampling crop diversity forin situas well as forex situconservation.

On-farm management and participatory evaluation of pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan [L.] Millspaugh) diversity across the agro-ecological zones of the Republic of Benin

“…However, local names do not necessarily reflect the genetic history of landraces because different names may be given to identical seeds of landraces or a single name may apply to heterogeneous crops [39]. This situation may contribute to under or over-estimation of the diversity within species [9,25,40,41]. To avoid redundancies and optimize the efficient conservation and sustainable use of pigeonpea diversity, it is important to conduct morphological and molecular characterizations to avoid redundancies and establish equivalence between the local names [28,42,43].…”

On-farm management and participatory evaluation of pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan [L.] Millspaugh) diversity across the agro-ecological zones of the Republic of Benin

“…However, local names do not necessarily reflect the genetic history of landraces because different names may be given to identical seeds of landraces or a single name may apply to heterogeneous crops [39]. This situation may contribute to under or over-estimation of the diversity within species [40,25,41,9]. To avoid redundancies and optimize the efficient conservation and sustainable use of pigeonpea diversity, it is important to conduct morphological and molecular characterizations to avoid redundancies and establish equivalence between the local names [28,42,43].…”

On-farm management and participatory evaluation of pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan [L.] Millspaugh) diversity across the agro-ecological zones of the Republic of Benin

“…Such a situation may contribute to under or over-estimate the diversity within species [40,25,41,9]. So to avoid redundancies and optimizing the efficient conservation and sustainable use of pigeonpea diversity, it is important to conduct morphological and molecular characterizations to avoid redundancies and establish equivalence between the local names [28,42,43].…”