Vegetable Landraces in the Souss Region of Morocco

Landraces (or traditional crop varieties) are highly heterogeneous crop genotype mixtures that often provide slightly differing phenotypes under field conditions.  The genetic heterogeneity contained within landraces is a valuable part of maintaining global diversity and is of paramount importance for world crop production.  Traditional crop varieties are directly used by subsistence farmers as a key component to sustaining their cropping systems.  Landraces are diverse and dynamic gene pools that evolve over time under both farmer and natural selection pressures, and this high amount of genetic diversity allows landraces to adapt to drought, heat, saline soil, or other extreme environmental conditions, which is essential to maintaining long-term productivity in extreme environments.  In Morocco, vegetable crop landraces are often used by small landholders and the genetic diversity within their landraces may be the only resource available to these farmers that allows them to cope with changing environmental conditions to optimize crop production.  An assessment of vegetable crops maintained as landraces was conducted in the Souss region of Morocco in April 2014.  From this evaluation, it was determined that some vegetable crops are still widely maintained as landrace populations (e.g., carrot, onion, turnip, melon, pumpkin, and watermelon), while others (e.g., tomato) are no longer maintained as landraces for several reasons.  Thus, landraces still play an important role in vegetable crop production systems for small landholders in the Souss region of Morocco.  Since vegetable landraces can adapt to local environmental conditions over time, they are critical components of crop production systems for these small farmers.