Farming communities around the world are facing hardship in nurturing and developing crop and animal biodiversity. Their experimentation and innovation practices are under stress. In light of recent international developments concerning innovation, trade and intellectual property (rights), there is an urgent need to develop new policies and laws that recognise and support the key contributions of rural people in the sustainable use of biodiversity. The government of China acknowledges the importance of the sustainable use of biological resources. China, the most populated country with the lowest amount of arable land per capita in the world, has no choice but to keep food security and the sustainable use of biodiversity high on its agenda. One of the most important policy tasks is to create incentives and rewards that recognise and value promising and successful, collaborative efforts to achieve these goals. The authors' research in China’s south-west mountainous areas confirms that farmers are key players in crop improvement and conservation and that farmer-researcher collaboration can produce added value that farmers or researchers alone could never realise. The authors illustrate these points with an example from the field.
