Entrepreneurial Traits and Self-Regulation in Livelihood Opportunities from Plant Genetic Resources and Farmers’ Varieties: A Critical Review

Abstract

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA), including the diverse, locally adapted materials that smallholder farmers have cultivated and refined across generations—collectively termed farmers' varieties—represent a foundational yet undervalued asset for rural livelihoods worldwide. Despite their biological and economic importance, the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial characteristics enable farmers to convert these resources into sustainable income remain poorly understood, and the role that regulatory self-regulation practices—international treaties, national legislation, and community-based governance—play in shaping those conversion pathways is rarely examined in an integrated manner. This critical narrative review synthesises peer-reviewed evidence published since 2001 to present to explore how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) dimensions—innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, autonomy, and competitive aggressiveness—interact with formal and informal self-regulation practices to determine livelihood outcomes from PGRFA. Literature informing this review was identified through systematic searches of five principal databases: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, and the FAO AGRIS database. The synthesis finds that entrepreneurially oriented farmers operating within well-designed self-regulation systems—including community seed banks, participatory plant breeding programmes, and value chain arrangements for underutilised crops—achieve markedly better livelihood outcomes than those constrained by fragmented or inequitable governance environments. Evidence further reveals that women, whose custodial role in agrobiodiversity is disproportionately large relative to their formal economic recognition, remain systematically excluded from the benefits that PGRFA-linked entrepreneurship could generate. The review concludes that bridging the gap between entrepreneurial potential and regulatory opportunity requires coherent policy that integrates farmer agency, intellectual property equity, and market facilitation.