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"Melaku Worede was at the heart of efforts to secure Ethiopia’s heritage of crop diversity — and in ensuring that farmers benefited. From 1979 to 1993, he led one of the premier crop gene banks in the world, the Plant Genetic Resources Center in Addis Ababa (now the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute). It was a time when uniform monocultures of crops such as maize (corn; Zea mays), wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were being widely planted. Melaku was passionate about saving the diversity of traditional crops before they were lost. The practices that Melaku developed, which he referred to as ‘conservation through use’, are now applied around the world."
(photo credit: Right Livelihood)
