Most of the global food supply is just 12 crops and 14 animals, an alarmingly shallow gene pool.
What doesn’t bend, breaks. That’s the worry of too few.
Three-quarters of the world’s critically important food-crop varieties have disappeared during the 20th century, and hundreds of locally adapted livestock breeds are on the verge of doing so.
Diversity is an alternative to catastrophe. The more variety in a system, the more resilient it is.