Guatemala, Zea mexicana (teosinte), the closest relative of maize has disappeared. The loss of endangered food crop relatives has been valued at about US$10 billion annually (Phillips and Meilleur, 1998).

There are two major conservation strategies: ex situ and in situ.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992) defines ex situ conservation as the conservation of components of biological diversity outside their natural habitats and in situ conservation as the conservation of ecosystems and natural habitats and the maintenance and recovery of viable populations of species in their natural surroundings. In an ideal world It would be preferable to conserve all diversity naturally (in situ), rather than move it into an artificial environment (ex situ). However, ex situ conservation techniques are necessary where in situ conservation cannot guarantee long-term security for a particular crop or wild species. In both cases, conservation aims to maintain the full diversity of living organisms; in situ conservation also protects the habitats and the interrelationships between organisms and their environment (Spellerberg and Hardes, 1992). In the agrobiodiversity context, the explicit focus is on conserving the full range of genetic variation within taxa (Maxted et al., 1997). The two conservation strategies are composed of a range of techniques (Table 3-4) that are complementary (Maxted et al., 1997).

Ecoagriculture is an approach to agricultural landscape management that seeks to simultaneously achieve production, livelihoods and wildlife/ecosystem conservation.

The Ecoagriculture Initiative secures land as protected areas for wildlife habitat in recognition that these areas may need to be cleared for future agriculture (McNeely and Scherr, 2003; Buck et al., 2004). A set of six production approaches have been proposed: (1) creating biodiversity reserves that benefit local farming communities, (2) developing habitat networks in non-farmed areas, (3) reducing land conversion to agriculture by increasing farm productivity, (4) minimizing agricultural pollution, (5) modifying management of soil, water and vegetation resources, (6) modifying farm systems to mimic natural ecosystems (McNeely and Scherr, 2003). A review of the feasibility of integrating production and conservation concluded that there are many cases of biodiversity-friendly agriculture (Buck et al., 2004, 2007), both for crop and livestock production (Neely and Hatfield, 2007). Nevertheless, economic considerations involving issues of valuation and payment for ecosystems services, as well as building a bridge between agriculturalists and conservation scientists remain a major challenge.

Modern molecular techniques for assessing and understanding the structure of wild genetic resources have greatly enhanced crop and animal breeding programs.

Over the last 20 years, a range of molecular marker techniques (Table 3-2) have informed plant genetic resource management activities (Newton et al., 1999; Lowe et al., 2004). These techniques have revolutionized genetics by allowing the quantification of variations in the genetic code of nuclear and organellar genomes, in ways which give high quality information, are reproducible, easily scored, easily automated, and include bioinformatics handling steps. These techniques involve universal primers that can be used across a range of plant, animal and microbial taxonomic groups, avoiding the need for individual development. They also provide unequivocal measures of allele frequencies;