Food ark is needed due to rapid genetic degradation

About 93% of seed varieties sold in the US in 1903 were extinct by 1983

https://rafiusa.org/blog/protecting-the-food-ark/

Summary:

• Food varieties extinction is happening all over the world—and it’s happening fast. In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. 
• Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. 
• In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only up to a hundred are grown there. 
• In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. 
• Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world’s food varieties over the past century. As for the 8,000 known livestock breeds, 1,600 are endangered or already extinct.
• In 1983, we found that about 93% of seed varieties sold in the US in 1903 were extinct by 1983. For example, commercial seed catalogues in 1903 offered 497 varieties of lettuce. In 1983, on 36 of those varieties were found in our national seed collection.
• Seed banks are critical to protecting our fast-disappearing crop diversity, because they preserve varieties that might otherwise disappear forever.

 

My comment: Both artificial selection and genetic editing of plant breeds have resulted in rapid genetic degradation. This is why scientists have built a Food Ark where to store plant seeds that have not experienced so heavy loss of genetic diversity. When do scientists understand that every time an organism experiences variation, artificial or ecological, biological information is at some rate lost? There is no mechanism for evolution.