Seeding Security: Why Agrobiodiversity Loss Threatens National Security

Photo: PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP/Getty Images
Across human history, food security has been strongly linked to peace and political stability. While the current global agrifood system remains remarkably productive, it is increasingly strained by shifting environmental conditions, growing food demands, and geopolitical tensions. Agricultural biodiversity, or agrobiodiversity, is the foundation of strong agricultural systems, constituting the natural capital from which farmers develop the crop species and traits that increase yields, enhance nutrition, and bolster resistance to floods, droughts, pests, and diseases. Safeguarding agrobiodiversity is therefore vital to enhancing agricultural resilience while reducing the existential threats that agricultural collapse poses to human life and livelihoods.
Q1: What is the status of global agrobiodiversity?
A1: Today, biodiversity is being lost faster than at any time on record. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the average abundance of terrestrial native species has declined by at least 20 percent across most ecosystems around the world, while the number of crop varieties grown on farms has fallen by more than 90 percent over the last 100 years. Paradoxically, it is the agrifood system itself that is the primary driver of the ecological disruption and degradation imperiling agrobiodiversity around the world.
What is biodiversity?
Biodiversity encompasses biological variation that spans from the level of the individual to the level of the ecosystem. This includes genetic and phenotypic variation among individuals within species, spatial and temporal variation in the distribution of these species, and the organizational diversity of communities within and across ecosystems.
What is agrobiodiversity?
Agrobiodiversity is the genetic, trait, and species variety and variability expressed across the plants, animals, microorganisms, and ecosystems that contribute to systems of food production.
The environmental impacts of modern food production are myriad. About half of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, while agricultural practices and other human activities have degraded up to 40 percent of the world’s land. Some industrial agriculture has led to the overexploitation of resources that drives habitat loss, the decline in the number of crop species and erosion of crop genetic diversity, and the introduction of invasive species and pollutants—all of which disrupt fragile ecosystems.
In this context, agriculture faces the opposing challenges of increasing food production to meet the needs of a growing global population, while reducing its ecological footprint to ensure that natural resources required for productive agriculture are sustained. In the absence of policies that safeguard agrobiodiversity, efforts to meet food demands threaten to erode the foundation of food production itself.
Q2: How does agrobiodiversity affect global food security?
A2: Agrobiodiversity loss is a threat to global food security—more than half of global caloric demand is satisfied by just three grains; rice, maize, and wheat (see Figure 1). Despite the existence of tens of thousands of edible plants, nearly all the remaining human caloric intake is accounted for by only 12 additional crops. While the species diversity among crops has declined, the genetic diversity of those crops has also eroded. Consolidation in species varieties, and the increasing genetic homogeneity of these varieties, threaten the stability of crop production.
Agrobiodiversity loss affects agrifood systems and household diets around the world, eroding all dimensions of food security. While threats to food security are often characterized as shocks, long-term trends of lost productivity from degraded lands and agrobiodiversity loss may pose more severe challenges for agrifood systems. By 2050, global food demand is projected to grow by more than 50 percent due to population growth and socioeconomic and demographic change. To accommodate this increase, demand for crops for human consumption and animal feed could grow by at least 100 percent in that same timeframe. Simultaneously, severe and erratic weather patterns will continue to threaten agricultural yields around the world—particularly in developing regions of the world that are already facing the largest yield gaps, the greatest climate threats to agricultural production, and the most pervasive hunger.
The overwhelming global reliance on such a small number of crops (and so few varieties of these crops) for so much of the world’s caloric production presents vulnerabilities across each level of the global food supply chain. The underperformance of harvest for key staple crops, like rice or wheat, can result in local shortages, which, in the aggregate, have broader impacts on global agricultural trade and food prices.
Agrobiodiversity is a tool to enhance global food security—in an uncertain world, diversification across the global agrifood system is imperative to safeguarding against acute and long-term declines in food security. Agrobiodiversity provides resilience against both physical and biological threats, spreading risk across a greater number of crops with varying capacities and traits that buffer against different shocks. Diversifying crop resources for agricultural production offers both a safety net for farmers contending with variable growing conditions, and a platform for greater, more efficient food production. At the national level, increased crop species diversity is one of the most effective tools for stabilizing agricultural production in the face of shocks and stresses, with increased country-wide crop species diversity conferring a significantly reduced probability of harvest failure.
Increasing crop diversity also results in direct effects on nutritional availability for individuals and populations. Today, about 2.8 billion people are unable to afford the least expensive healthy diet. Enhancing agrobiodiversity in agricultural production enables increased access to high-quality, nutritious foods, helping to combat the hidden hunger of micronutrient deficiency that affects one-third of the world’s population. At a global scale, increased crop diversity results in higher nutritional stability, ensuring nutrient availability despite disturbances to agricultural production. Crop biodiversity has a similar impact at the local and household level. Across households in northern Ghana, for example, increased agricultural biodiversity was significantly associated with increased dietary diversity—a proxy for nutritional security—among young children from households of low socioeconomic status, demonstrating the importance of agrobiodiversity for the most vulnerable populations.
Q3: How else does agrobiodiversity affect global security?
A3: Agrobiodiversity loss directly threatens ecological security, food security, and economic security, the ramifications of which threaten social and political stability and contribute to conflict. Still, the magnitude and breadth of the national security threats that agrobiodiversity protects against remain relatively underappreciated.
Ecological security—Ecosystem collapse from biodiversity loss could not only result in cascading extinctions—including, but not limited agriculturally important species—but irreparable disruptions to environmental conditions that affect human well-being. These disruptions can result in increased health risks, such as infectious disease exposure and pandemic risk, as well as indirect consequences associated with pollution from increased agricultural input use (e.g., fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics). Diminishment of human health and well-being ultimately manifests in significant challenges to global development and economic loss.
Food security—In 2023, in the wake of compounding disruptions to global food systems, about 2.33 billion people experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. The knock-on effects of this food insecurity include increased risk of social grievance, political instability, and conflict. And these risks are reciprocal, as hunger and livelihood loss fans conflict, and conflict compromises agriculture, livelihoods, and food security. This relationship has been demonstrated throughout history and still today in Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, and other global hunger hotspots. As such, the sustainability of natural resources that are foundational to global food production is crucial to numerous U.S. and foreign security considerations.
Economic security—In its ability to provide more stable and abundant yields, agrobiodiversity acts as an economic safety net for those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods—today accounting for more than half the world’s population. Many more people in the world are reliant on the diversity of crops that provide a wide range of ecosystem services (e.g., nutrient cycling and carbon storage, freshwater purification, and cultural services) and natural products (e.g., food, fuel, medicine) that are essential to the well-being and security of billions. Ecosystem services provided an estimated value of more than USD 125 trillion globally in 2011 alone—more than one and a half times greater than the total global GDP of that year. The loss of these services, in part or total, would therefore result in a significant, if not insurmountable, economic catastrophe for many countries worldwide.
Q4: What can be done to protect and utilize agrobiodiversity across the food system?
A4: Protecting agrobiodiversity requires recognizing the link between on-the-farm (in situ) diversity and that diversity which is collected, stored, and studied in genebanks and seedbanks (ex situ) around the world. For the farmer, safeguarding agrobiodiversity is about ensuring present access to a wide variety of crops and seeds, as well as future access to new varieties and species that come from ex situ stores. The imperative to halt the loss of crop biodiversity is thus two-fold; first, to effectively ensure the capacity to access and utilize diverse crops, and second, to allow crop breeders and researchers to develop new varietals with increased resistance to environmental stressors. Without keen attention paid to in situ and ex situ agrobiodiversity, and their relationship to one another, efforts to protect agrobiodiversity will have limited impact. The implementation of programs and policies that treat agrobiodiversity protection as both a goal and a tool of national security strategies should therefore be urgently considered. As global conservation efforts that protect crops and useful plants remain distressingly low, paradigmatic shifts within governmental and non-governmental institutions should recognize the extensive benefits provided by prioritizing agrobiodiversity preservation.
Zane Swanson is deputy director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Caitlin Welsh is the director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at CSIS.