Of growing interest in the international policy arena is the promotion of measures for the conservation and sustainable use of genetic resources of actual or potential value for food and agriculture. Because private sector plant breeding firms have little incentive to maintain serious in situ crop genetic resource (CGR) conservation programs outside of their own proprietary collections, most of costs of large scale conservation activities will have to fall on the public sector.

While studies published to date address various aspects of the economics of the conservation and valuation of genetic resources for wild species or for pharmaceuticals, few address the agro-biodiversity issue, and none address the issue in an integrated form or outline the general economics issues associated with public investment in conservation plans for reducing the erosion of biodiversity in agriculture. This paper fills this gap with a dynamic optimization model for assessing potential scenarios for publicly-funded agro-biodiversity conservation programs with the objective of maximizing the economic returns in the market for agricultural goods. The first part of the paper specifies a model for the change in accessions from in situ to ex situ collections as a function of investment in in situ agro-biodiversity conservation programs. The second part models the economic returns associated with these investments. The model explicitly accounts for potential irreversible loss of CGRs as well as treating conservation expenditures as largely irreversible, i.e., sunk. Uncertainty in current and future levels of CGR and uncertainty over future demand and supply of agricultural products are also explicitly treated in the model. The paper provides numerical illustrations of the model and discussion of the implications of the model and results for policymaking.