London, United Kingdom
May 22, 2007
Banking seeds to secure essential
food crops for the world’s growing population and changing
climate received a £10 million investment from the
Department for International
Development, Barry Gardiner, Minister for Biodiversity,
announced today.
The assistance is part of the Department for International
Development’s aim of fighting global poverty and hunger in the
world’s poorest countries.
The new funding, over four years, will help the
Global Crop Diversity Trust
(GCDT) bank hundreds of thousands of staple food seeds for the
world’s 21 major food crops such as wheat, barley, rice and
maize, that will help fight hunger in the developing world.
Speaking at the Banking of the Billionth Seed event in Wakehurst
as part of the UN’s International Day for Biodiversity, Mr
Gardiner said: “More than 30 million people in Africa will not
have enough food to eat this year. Fighting hunger is one of the
greatest challenges facing the world now and over the coming
decades. In an increasingly unpredictable climate with a growing
population, pressure on global agriculture will only continue to
grow.
“Protecting and maintaining a wide variety of food crops through
seed banks, making sure that farmers have the raw materials to
adapt and improve crops, is essential in meeting these
challenges.”
Gareth Thomas, the Minister for International Development said:
“It is a scandal that millions of people go hungry every day
because there isn’t a regular supply of basic food items such as
rice. That is why the UK is working with research groups in the
UK and abroad to collect seeds that can be used in times of
scarcity. This initiative will help ensure some of the poorest
people in the world don’t go to work or to school on an empty
stomach.”
Cary Fowler, Executive Secretary of the Trust, said: “The
support of the UK will make a major impact. Conserving crop
diversity is a long term investment, which yields huge returns
in human well-being, yet many governments are unwilling to make
such long term commitments. The Trust welcomes the UK's support,
sharing our vision and becoming the largest country donor so
far."
The Trust provides an essential global role supporting the long
term development and maintenance of seed banks that help
preserve crops for farmers in the poorest countries in the
world. Seed banks can be vulnerable to conflict and natural
disasters and the Trust has set up the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault in the Arctic as the ultimate safety net for global crop
diversity.
Conserving the right type of crop for the right climate and
production of the right foods is not technologically complex but
is an immense task; for example there are more than 100,000
different varieties of wheat, a global staple food. Reliable
funding to the world’s seed banks will help to maintain the
diversity of crops, help share information amongst seed banks
and make their services available to those who most need it.
BACKGROUND
1. The Department for International Development’s support for
the Global Crop Diversity Trust comes under its Strategy for
Research on Sustainable Agriculture and is in addition to £20
million a year for the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research. The £10 million commitment is over four
years.
2. The Global Crop Diversity Trust was set up to ensure the
conservation and availability of crop diversity for food
security worldwide. It is an independent international
organisation, established through a partnership between the
Consultative Group for International Agricultural research and
the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
3. To provide long term funding the Trust decided to establish
an endowment fund to finance these activities. The target for
this fund is $260m (£130m) of which $135m (£68m) has now been
pledged or committed by a range of other donors including
Norway, United States, Australia and the Gates Foundation.
4. The Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP) was set up by the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and was launched in 1995 with a
grant of £29.9m by the Millennium Commission. It is housed in
the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building in Wakehurst Place, West
Sussex.
5. The Millennium Seed Bank Project seeks to develop a global
seed conservation network, capable of safeguarding wild plant
species. One of its aims is to collect seeds, herbarium
specimens and data from 24,200 species worldwide, including the
entire UK seed bearing flora, and to conserve these collections
to international standards, both at the Millennium Seed Bank and
in the countries of origin.
6. The Trust has an Executive Board which is responsible for
overseeing the operations of the Trust. This includes a range of
distinguished individuals including: Wangari Maathai (the Kenyan
Nobel Peace Prize winner); Lew Coleman (former vice-Chairman and
CFO of the Bank of America and currently President of DreamWorks
Animation); Margaret Catley-Carlsson (former President of the
Canadian International Development Agency and Deputy Director of
UNICEF); and, Sir Peter Crane (former Director of Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew). |
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