Have We Really Lost 93% Of Food Varieties In 100 Years?

29 August 2015

 - You have probably heard that we have 93% fewer food crops available today than 100 yeas ago. That a great portion of our food diversity has gone extinct and disappeared. It seems logical when you look at the infographic above based on a 1983 survey of the National Seed Storage Laboratory undertaken by the Plant Genetic Resources Project of the Rural Advancement Fund , and it has been spread and quoted widely.

It isn’t hard to believe considering this since we are experiencing an extinction rate of approximately 1000x the normal background rate and have seen an average loss of 52% in over 10,300 cohorts measured since 1970. But, a more detailed examination of the facts leads us to see that the diversity of human food crops, unlike general biodiversity, has not shrunk significantly overall.