Drying spices and medicinal plants.
Jaya Bahadur Thapa and his wife Lal Kumari Thapa live in Chaur, a village in Kaski District in western Nepal. Both are traditional healers. They have domesticated about 145 medicinal plants in their home garden and nearby land.
In Nepal our scientists and researchers, and many local partners, are working to support the conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity in order to improve the livelihoods, nutrition and sustainability of poor farming communities, including:
• A Neglected and Underutilized Species Initiative, is helping communities benefit from traditional local crops, conserving them in farmers fields. Many rural communities depend on these locally adapted plant species for income, food security, and nutrition. These crops are often more resilient than modern staple crops, but they are marginalized by modern agriculture and markets, and are at risk of being lost.
• A Home Garden Initiative, which aims to understand how to improve, conserve and use biodiversity in smallholder home gardens. It also enables support for rural women, who tend to have little money to invest in farming and limited or no land holdings but who play a crucial role in agriculture.
• A Traditional Crop Genetic Diversity Programme, which since 2011 has been working to improve the resilience of mountain agricultural ecosystems to unpredictable environmental change and conserve the crop diversity most useful to the farmers who have to cope with these challenging conditions.
• Genetic Resource Policy Initiatives, to strengthen the capacity of Nepal to develop comprehensive genetic policy framework that conserve and make available invaluable plant genetic resources and information.
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