The theme for the International Day for Biological Diversity on 22 May 2019 is: "Our Biodiversity, Our Food, Our Health".
While restaurants in cities around the world offer a tremendous variety of dishes, our global diet as a whole - what people actually eat - is becoming more homogenized. Rice, one the world's top staple foods, vividly illustrates this paradox: of the 90,000 varieties of rice stored in gene banks, only 40,000 are being cultivated, and perhaps no more than a dozen can be found on your regular supermarket shelf. Combined with high-yield, intensive agriculture, the choices are bound to drastically decline over time. This is worrying from the point of view of sustainability, food security, biodiversity and health.
...