From Kristin Mercer, Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, on her EcoSummit presentation:
“Climate change will continue to have wide-ranging effects on agriculture, and subsistence farmers producing crop landraces in centers of crop diversity face unique challenges. Depending on the evolutionary response of their crop populations to changing conditions, they may maintain or lose productivity, the latter likely to occur in maize in southern Mexico. This same outcome may be generalizable to other crops and other regions, but will likely depend on the patterns of adaptive genetic diversity and farmer practices.”