Amaranth, a nutritious but neglected and underutilized crop is gaining recognition as an important  source of food that could be beneficial for undernourished people of poor farming communities.

The National Geographic announces how important the cultivation of this orphan crop could benefit  the people of Mexico. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.

Since 2001 Bioversity International has been working in south Asia and Latin America to enhance  the sustainable conservation and use of amaranth.  Through the IFAD – NUS III Project currently being implemented in Bolivia, India and Nepal Bioversity and its partners are pursuing four important objectives related to this crop and other underutilized species, viz.:

• Develop and test new methods and tools in close partnership with farmers and value chain actors aimed at enhancing their capacities to sustainably conserve traditional crops and associated knowledge at the farm level; 
• Explore ways of integrating the monitoring of diversity on-farm, along with use-enhancement goals, through inter-disciplinary and multi-sector approaches;
• Promote a more balanced complementary conservation agenda in national programmes, based on the need to combat genetic erosion and to meet the needs of agricultural biodiversity users; and
• Provide useful findings to guide further research related to climate change and its impact on species and varieties deployed in local production systems.

Thanks to IFAD's latest support, linkages between custodian farmers, community seed banks and ex situ gene banks have been strengthened for amaranth genetic resources in Nepal. Furthermore, field trials for the characterization of amaranth have been also carried out, allowing the discovering of new attractive varieties bearing new and valuable market potentials.