**6. Factors influencing conservation of traditional vegetables in Tanzania rural communities**

Traditional African vegetables represent a diverse and widespread set of vegetables that are consumed across Tanzania. However, the knowledge base of traditional African vegetable conservation remains truncated due to a deficiency in research and policy support and impedes efforts to promote widespread cultivation, consumption and commercialisation. Therefore, even the conservation of traditional vegetable among rural farmers is generally low. Conservation is the wise utilization of natural resource that involves maintaining essential ecological processes and life support systems, preserving genetic diversity and ensuring sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems. Thus, conservation involves elements of protection, preservation, utilization and sustainable management of plant genetic resources that satisfy the increasing or matches with increasing efficiency, current and future needs of humanity and other organisms. Farmer's efforts in conservation, improvement and utilization of traditional vegetables currently under production serve as the basis of understanding different aspects of these crops by research community [37]. Dweba and Mearns [45] argued that it is vital to conserve indigenous knowledge on traditional vegetables to ensure the availability and utilization of these important food sources for resource-poor rural communities. Mpasiwakoma et al. [46] study found that most rural household in Tanzania depended on wild food plants during the periods of food crisis, this suggest that conservation by utilization is an effective method. Keller et al. [31] argued that socioeconomic status of rural communities has influence in the conservation of traditional vegetables such that a community with alternative sources of income and thus higher food security is more likely to forego utilization of traditional vegetables compared to a community whose members relies of on these species as source of their dietary requirements. Therefore, there is a need of Government and Non-Governmental organizations to encourage conservation of traditional vegetables in order to increase TAVs in natural habitats.

#### **6.1 The effort to safeguard the biodiversity of traditional vegetables in Tanzania**

Biodiversity in general and agrobiodiversity in particular are crucial for adaptation to climate change, for resilience and for human health as related to dietary diversity [47]. Chaudhary et al. [6] proposed utilization of crop wild relatives, farmer's fields, community seed bank, participatory crop improvement, and value addition of underutilized crops to be methods of in situ conservation while research stations, botanical garden, and national and international gene bank to be methods of ex situ conservation. Muhanji et al. [48] noted contribution made by institutions such as AVRDC in the conservation of traditional vegetables in Tanzania including awareness

creation, capacity building to farmers, development of improved TAV varieties, and establishing seed multiplication and distribution systems for few TAV species, business support and marketing of TAVs.
