A strategic contribution to the Global Conservation Trust (GCT), a $US260 million global effort to protect collections of crop plant germplasm, will be made by The Grains Research & Development Corporation (GRDC) to help consolidate Australia’s $7 billion grain industry.

Making the announcement on behalf of the Board, Managing Director, John Lovett said the GRDC believed that better managing under-resourced collections held by national centres, plus those in international agricultural research centres such as CIMMYT in Mexico, would help preserve significant genetic material in many of the world’s 1470 ‘genebanks’.

"While the GRDC has pledged to support the specific objectives of the GCT - the conservation, in perpetuity, of global genebank collections - we will adopt a more strategic approach in terms of where we allocate funding and support.

"In the past, for example, we’ve supported international collaboration with centres such as the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, whose collection includes more than 140,000 cereal accessions," Professor Lovett said.

Vavilov is more than 100 years old and has survived Tsarism, Communism and Nazi invasion. While under fire from German forces, scientists guarding the Institute starved to death rather than eat packets of wheat, corn and other seeds in their desks.

More recently, important germplasm collections in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan had been decimated by starving, desperate people.

Last year, with GRDC support, 6000 pulse and cereal accessions, including 2000 lines of chickpeas, lentils, field peas and faba beans, entered Australia from Armenia, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan in what was the greatest single importation of international plant germplasm to Australia.

The pulse germplasm has already displayed good ascochyta, fusarium and viral resistance in an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and GRDC funded disease nursery at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), Syria.

Professor Lovett said land races and their wild relatives were declining and had to be captured before they were lost, along with the potential resistance to modern diseases and ecological pressures which many of them offered. Land races are lines developed from farmer selection over hundreds of years of traditional agriculture.