Gender Dynamics in Agro-biodiversity Conservation in Sikkim and Nagaland*

Abstract

Subsistence farmers all over the world, and especially in environments where high-yielding crops and livestock do not prosper, play a major role in maintaining agro-biodiversity by cultivating a large variety of crop species. The Convention on Biodiversity defines agro-biodiversity as ‘the diversity at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from genes to ecosystems, that is involved in agriculture and food production . . . the fundamental and distinct property of agricultural biodiversity is that it is largely created, maintained and managed by humans’ (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2001). Thus, agro-biodiversity is the biological diversity of agriculture-related species and their wild varieties which occurs at the levels of the agro-ecosystem, species and gene