World: Agriculture Organizations Invest US$109 Million to Secure Raw Genetic Material Critical to Maintaining Food Production
By Shadrack Kavilu
The agreement between the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the CGIAR Consortium provides US$109 million over five years for the CGIAR Research Program for Managing and Sustaining Crop Collections, which is dedicated to maintaining the 706,000 samples of crop, forage and agro forestry resources held in “genebanks” at 11 CGIAR research centers around the world.
The seed banks house the world’s largest and most diverse collections of wheat, maize, rice, potato, banana, sorghum, forages, beans and many other plants.
This diversity is viewed as essential to providing farmers with new crop varieties critical to overcoming an array of weather- and pest-related threats. Over the last ten years alone, CGIAR genebanks have distributed more than one million samples to plant breeders and crop researchers, a process that has saved millions of lives globally through the development of new resilient crop varieties.
“With climate change greatly intensifying demands on plant breeders to develop new heat- drought- and flood-tolerant crops, it is particularly important for the samples conserved in the CGIAR’s genebanks to be readily accessible and in optimal condition,” said Åslaug Marie Haga, incoming executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Dr. Frank Rijsberman, the CEO of the CGIAR Consortium said the program underpins global agricultural research and it builds a foundation for all of our other research programs to succeed.
“Ultimately, the seeds and vegetative material stored and maintained in the genebanks are the lifeblood of the crop improvement research being carried out across the CGIAR Consortium. If our genebanks suffer, our research suffers,” said Dr. Rijsberman, adding that that’s why we continue to work with the Trust, an organization dedicated solely to protecting crop diversity, to put these genebanks on a more firm financial footing and ensure they will be maintained and improved for generations to come.”
Dr Rijsberman noted that maintaining the hundreds of thousands of crop varieties held throughout the CGIAR network presents a complex challenge. Seeds and vegetative material must be collected, cleaned, stored and rejuvenated when aged.
They also must be tested periodically for health and viability, safely duplicated and exchanged. And each of these steps must be carefully recorded and catalogued. Genebanks must also dedicate funds and research to find better, cost-effective ways to conserve crops that do not produce seed or whose seeds are hard to store like potatoes, cassava and bananas.
In addition to lacking funding for basic maintenance costs, crop diversity collections are threatened by political unrest and weather disasters. For example, the genebank at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and its valuable collection of cultivated and wild relatives of wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea, faba bean, peas and forage crops, was recently threatened by conflicts around ICARDA’s headquarters in Aleppo, Syria, and had to be rapidly replicated or relocated to other CGIAR genebanks, national partners and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
Beyond maintaining the vitality of the existing collections, the CGIAR Consortium partnership with the Trust envisions adding some 56,000 new samples or “accessions” to the genebanks by 2015, including a large number of wild relatives of cultivated crops.
Wild relatives often contain important traits, such as drought tolerance or disease resistance that can be hard to find in cultivated varieties. New plant breeding technologies are making it easier to borrow traits from distant wild relatives and use them to improve the productivity or fitness of a cultivated crop.
The CGIAR’s genebank collection is intended for everyday use by plant breeders and crop researchers. The collection is safety duplicated in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a remote island near the
“Given all of the turbulent issues surrounding agriculture and food today, from high commodity prices to threats from weather extremes, I think the international community is waking up to the enormous value of preserving crop diversity,” said Margaret Catley-Carlson, outgoing chair of the Trust’s executive board and former president of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
She stressed the need to put the seed banks on a more firm financial footing to make sure they remain prepared to respond to any new challenges, expected or unexpected, that could threaten agriculture production anywhere in the world.
“We see opportunities with this new program to knit together a global community committed to crop biodiversity that extends beyond CGIAR genebanks and allows funds to be invested more wisely,” said Charlotte Lusty, a scientist with the Trust who is working on the partnership with the CGIAR genebanks.