2009. The modern 'global standard' diet contains an increasingly large percentage of a relatively small number of major staple commodity crops, which have increased substantially in the share of the total food energy (calories), protein, fat, and food weight that they provide to the world's human population, including wheat, rice, sugar, maize, soybean (by +284%), palm oil (by +173%), and sunflower (by +246%). Whereas nations used to consume greater proportions of locally or regionally important food biodiversity, wheat has become a staple in over 97% of countries, with the other global staples showing similar dominance worldwide. Other crops have declined sharply over the same period, including rye, yam, sweet potato (by -45%), cassava (by -38%), coconut, sorghum (by -52%) and millets (by -45%). Conservation Attempts to conserve or safeguard agrobiodiversity usually focus on species or genetic level of agrobiodiversity. Conservation of genetic diversity and species diversity can be carried out ex situ, which means removing the materials from their growing site and looking after them elsewhere, or in situ, which means that they are conserved in their natural or cultivated site. While these two approaches are sometimes pitted against each other as either/or, both have merits. Conservation practitioners recommend integrating both methods, according to the purpose of conservation, threats, uniqueness of diversity, etc. Ex situ conservation Ex situ conservation is defined as the “conservation of components of biological diversity outside their natural habitats.” Ex situ conservation is the conservation of genetic resources (species, varieties, cultivars, sub-species, landraces etc.) for food and agriculture outside their natural habitat, in a managed environment including: botanical gardens, seedbanks, pollenbanks, field genebanks, cryobank or herbaria. Ex situ conservation is considered a relatively reliable way of maintaining genetic diversity, since it is usually preserved over the longer term and is less prone to change. The diversity of much of the world's major crops has been extensively collected and conserved in genebanks. Over 7 million samples are conserved in 1,750 genebanks worldwide. Collections are safety-duplicated as an insurance in case of damage to one genebank. In addition, most globally important collections of annual or seed-bearing crops have a backup in the Svalbard global seed vault. Ex situ conservation offers some advantages for seed-bearing crops: 1) Seed requires little space; 2) Ex situ conservation can be implemented anywhere; 3) There is easy access to what is conserved for distribution, further use, research and breeding; 4) Costs for maintaining