"The world struggles to feed its growing population" is an all-too-common headline. Several reasons are behind this challenge, including inefficiencies in food production and distribution, food waste, and a lack of equitable access to healthy diets. Our food system bears significant environmental externalities, including biodiversity loss, land degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Ecosystem deterioration exacerbates the shortage of adequate food and nutrition and threatens future food security and genetic gains. Poverty, inequalities in access to food and adequate diets, and low wages are some of the social externalities in current food systems.
According to the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, food insecurity rose in Africa in 2024, with over 1 billion people, or two-thirds of the population, were unable to consistently access or afford a healthy diet. Globally, malnutrition is persistently prevalent in children and women.
Only three commodity staples – rice, maize and wheat – provide two-thirds of the calories people consume. These have limited nutritional value and contribute to poor health.
Moreover, crop commodities, generally produced at an industrial scale, require significant quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that drive environmental decay, climate change, and extinction of many species.
Our food system is broken.
To help fix it, experts from around the globe launched the 2025 Kunming Manifesto: Agrobiodiversity for people and planet at the 2025 Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) Annual Summit on 3 September in Dakar, Senegal.
"If we're going to transform the global food system, we need to encourage biodiversity on our plate and bring underutilized crops back to the farmers' field and on our tables – not only at international forums,"
said Carlo Fadda , Director of Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT .
The Manifesto is the key output of the third International Agrobiodiversity Congress (3rd IAC), attended by more than 800 participants from 60 countries, held earlier this year in Kunming, China. It synthesizes the collective contributions to the global agrobiodiversity debate and provides examples from regions around the world to illustrate that supporting agrobiodiversity improves diets, food security, and ecosystems.
As a co-author of the Manifesto and co-chair of the congress's scientific committee, Fadda reiterated the imperative need for stakeholders across the food system – from farmers and practitioners to policymakers, researchers, government agencies, funders, agribusinesses, food processors, distributors and other actors to join forces. The Manifesto puts forth realistic actions to immediately start bringing agrobiodiversity into the mainstream.
Experts at the congress called for agrobiodiversity to become a main component of the Rio Conventions on climate, biodiversity, and desertification. Presently, agrobiodiversity is an afterthought at these forums, despite its proven potential to contribute to solving the problems the conventions perpetually struggle with.
Kunming's attendees ask for a paradigm-bending power shift toward the world's Indigenous and local communities. As the stewards of agrobiodiversity largely displaced by agricultural modernization, their knowledge and expertise will be essential to the policies, research, and market-access tools needed for agrobiodiversity to thrive.
The Manifesto examines the linkages between agrobiodiversity and climate resilience, ecosystem health, nutrition, economic livelihoods, and social equity. Several controversial issues facing agrobiodiversity's proponents, including productivity, investment, and market demand are addressed in the Manifesto.
"Productivity can be addressed through a combination of research, funding, and policies to support it," Fadda said. "And the funding for agrobiodiversity is right in front of us: billions of dollars subsidize business-as-usual agriculture. It's time to put agrobiodiversity at the forefront for the benefit of the people and the planet alongside improved soil and water management."
The document includes examples from China , France , Indonesia , Kenya , Mexico , Peru , and Uganda . All demonstrate how communities, researchers and international organizations delivered lasting human, environmental, and socioeconomic health based on agrobiodiversity. To make them scalable, however, we need greater engagement from donors, investors, policymakers, and the private sector.
Among CGIAR's contributions, one case study evaluates how community seed banks in Kenya and Uganda supported by the Alliance between 2010 and 2023, provided more than 10,000 people with adequate, sustained seed security; more affordable, diverse, and nutritious foods; and almost US $100,000 in sales of seeds and products derived from agrobiodiversity and native tree species.
"Many of these problems cannot be solved by agrobiodiversity alone," Fadda said, echoing the SOFI report's plea for investment in resilient agrifood systems 'in agriculture, research and development, and infrastructure.',
"But agrobiodiversity can help remedy the systemic inequality and distortion in the food system. One of its great advantages, as the case studies in the manifesto show, is that multistakeholder collaboration can quickly bring nutritional, environmental, and economic benefits to vulnerable communities - often just by supporting the rich agrobiodiversity these communities already have."
To read the Manifesto, click here .
