Traditional landraces are repositories of adaptive traits lost in modern cultivars. Discuss their role in climate-resilient agriculture in India, with suitable examples.

Landraces are traditional varieties that farmers have selected over generations under local stresses. FAO estimates that about 75% of crop diversity was lost between 1900 and 2000 [4], mainly because local varieties were replaced by improved ones [3]. The landraces that survive are India's genetic insurance against climate change.

Why landraces hold adaptive traits

• They were selected for survival under local stress (cold, flood, pests), not for high-input yield.
• Modern high-yielding varieties rest on a narrow genetic base. A SKUAST-Kashmir study found that Kashmir's landraces keep cold-tolerance genes that modern varieties have partly lost [1].

Role in climate-resilient agriculture

• Cold stress: Kashmir rice is genetically close to temperate rice of Korea and Northeast China. Its genes can be donor material for high-altitude breeding [1].
• Floods: The SUB1 gene came from FR13A, a traditional Odisha variety [2]. It was bred into Swarna-Sub1, which survives full submergence for over two weeks and was released in India by CRRI [5]. This protects farmers in flood-prone eastern India.
• Disease resistance: Screening more than 17,000 cultivated and wild rice samples found disease resistance [6]. This shows the value of gene banks.
• Genomics: Kashmir landraces were mapped against the global 3K rice panel (3,010 samples) [1]. This helps breeders find and transfer the right genes.

Challenges

• Genetic erosion: farmers replace landraces with higher-yielding seed [3]. One farmer bears the cost of conservation while everyone shares the benefit.
• Gene-to-field gap: moving a trait into a variety farmers will grow takes years of breeding.
• Benefit-sharing: gene data stored on computers can let breeders use a trait without the physical seed, so the farmers who kept it may get nothing.

Way forward

• Ex-situ storage at ICAR-NBPGR combined with on-farm incentives. The PPV&FR Act, 2001 recognises and rewards farmers who conserve landraces [7].
• Pre-breeding to move adaptive genes into high-yielding varieties, so farmers get yield and resilience together.
• Characterising landraces from under-studied Himalayan and north-eastern regions.

Landraces join heritage, science and adaptation. If conservation rewards farmers and genomics speeds up breeding, they can underpin SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 13 (Climate Action), making Indian farming resilient without giving up yield.