Economic Valuation of Biodiversity for Agriculture.

Biodiversity has become economically important. Most general biologists focus on diversity across species, and within-species classification is given little attention by taxonomists. But to agriculturalists the latter is vital, because plant and animal breeding depends on within-species diversity-although in the past two or three decades, improvements in biotechnological tools have enabled breeders to use genetic diversity in other species in the same genus. The following discussion on rice illustrates this well. Moreover, further development of biotechnology tools is now enabling plant and animal breeders to use genetic material from more diverse sources.