The importance of community based on-farm conservation in imparting dynamism to the genetic resource variability and ecosystem services needs no emphasize. Local agrobiodiversity is closely linked with the rural life, livelihood and the cultural ethos of the communities. Many rural communities including over 550 tribal groups living in diverse agroecological regions of India have been conserving and enriching genetic resources of many crops to meet their nutritional, health and livelihood security along with ecological security.

Such on-farm conservation is assuring higher importance in the context of global climate change. The assuming threat of climate change offers opportunity to test the adaptive strength and fitness of different components of genetic diversity to unprecedented abiotic stresses, such as drought, flood or salinity. It opens opportunity to farmers to select and improve such diversity best suited to the change. There is also concern that changing lifestyles and economic value system are hastening the loss of genetic diversity. As there was no prior estimate on the wealth of genetic diversity, a precise measure of loss is not possible. However, according to the opinions of the elder community members, many land races familiar to them in the past are no longer available. For example, fifty years ago, the tribal communities of the Eastern Ghats of India were familiar with more than 1,000 land races of rice and more recent estimates show the number had declined drastically. Therefore, promotion of on-farm conservation, monitoring the change and safe guarding the available genetic diversity is important.

The climate may also influence other factors, like land fragmentation, traditional seed storage systems, seed supply and viability with impact on genetic diversity. Given the potential changes in global temperature, regional precipitation patterns and sea level, need for harnessing diverse genetic resources for extensive crop breeding to mitigate the adverse effects of such changes may assume higher importance. Traditional varieties subjected to on-farm evaluation and selection across several seed cycles during these changes may possibly possess better breeding value. Therefore, on-farm conservation offers far higher advantage to the emerging situation, although the ex situ conservation is important.

M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), since its inception, 20 years back, has been undertaking and advocating agrobiodiversity conservation with emphasis on community participatory on-farm approach along with ex situ conservation. This work has been focusing at three important agrobiodiversity rich Eastern and Western Ghats in India. These are the Jeypore tract of Orissa, Kolli Hills of Tamil Nadu and the Wayanad in Kerala. Jeypore tract is known as the major centre of rice genetic diversity. Kolli Hills is notable for small diversity. Wayanad has large medicinal plant diversity. The first two locations fall within the Eastern Ghats and the last within the Western Ghats. The small millets, also called as ‘nutritious millets’, are important underutilized food crops with high adaptive value under harsh agroclimatic and marginal farming conditions. The in situ and ex situ systems of conservation have been studied largely from the point of view of the contributions of scientists and foresters. However, the role of local communities in in situ on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity has not received equal attention. Therefore, the MSSRF has set up a Community Agrobiodiversity Centre (CAbC) at Kalpetta, Wayanad. These regions have larger tribal population engaged in traditional conservation and is also known for the wealth of traditional knowledge for example special rice varieties like Njavara, which are used in Ayurveda, a popular Indian traditional medicine.

While the MSSRF work on on-farm conservation was started in 1989, the ex situ conservation was added since 1994 with the establishment of the Community Gene Bank under G.T. Scarascia Mugnozza Community Genetic Resource Centre (SMCGRC). The SMCGRC follows integrated conservation with on-farm and ex situ Community Gene Bank (CGB) activities as well as empowerment of rural youths, school children and rural women and men in documenting and conserving local agrobiodiversity using field level Agrobiodiversity Conservation Corps (ABCC), school level Genome Clubs (GC), and village level Gene-Seed-Grain Banks (GSGB) in hub and spokes model. The GCB also imparts them legal and genetic literacy associated with conservation, access and benefit sharing.