Chicago, Illinois
February 15, 2009
Only two years after launching an
ambitious effort to save endangered crop species, the
Global Crop Diversity Trust
announced today it is on track to save from extinction 100,000
different varieties of food crops from 46 countries, making it
one of the largest and most successful biological rescue efforts
ever undertaken.
“We are moving quickly to regenerate and preserve seed samples
representing thousands of distinct varieties of critical food
crops like rice, maize, and wheat in 46 countries that were well
on their way to total extinction,” said Cary Fowler, Executive
Director of the Trust. “I think it is fair to say that without
this effort, many of them would
have been lost forever.”
In many countries, stresses as mundane as poor refrigeration and
inadequate funding and as dramatic as war and economic collapse
threaten seed collections of crop varieties that do not exist
anywhere else in the world. The imperiled seeds targeted for
rescue by the Trust are samples of staple crops stored in crop
gene banks in Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Central and
South America. They include rare varieties of barley, wheat,
rice, banana/plantain, potato, cassava, chickpea, maize, lentil,
bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea and yam.
Fowler said the Trust already has agreements in place with 49
institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000
crop samples identified as endangered. Agreements for preserving
the remaining varieties are expected to be completed soon.
The initiative is one of the biggest rescue efforts ever of any
threatened biological species and by far the largest rescue of
endangered domesticated crop varieties. The main funding for the
project was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
with additional support from the Grains Research and Development
Corporation, an
Australian farmers’ organization.
While many of the imperiled varieties may no longer be growing
in farmer’s fields—and exist only in seed collections— they
could be critically important to the future of global food
production. For example, farmers in the developing world
desperately need new crop varieties that can help them overcome
pests and diseases, poor soils, and rapidly changing climate
conditions while keeping pace with the food demands of a growing
population. The plant breeders they turn to for help depend on
publicly-accessible national, regional and international crop
gene banks to provide them with the widest variety of genetic
traits that can allow farmers to overcome these challenges.
“Growing conditions and food demands change rapidly and breeders
never know which variety stored in a crop gene bank somewhere in
the world is going to be that proverbial needle in the haystack
that will provide the critical trait that can literally make the
difference between abundance and starvation,” said Fowler. “So
while these seeds being saved represent crop varieties from the
past, they could easily play a role in the crops of the future.”
In fact, most of the food crops widely planted today are the
products of breeding efforts that owe their success to the
genetic wealth stored in crop gene banks. For example, to create
Sonalika, an incredibly successful variety of wheat widely
planted in the developing world, breeders used traits from
varieties of wheat collected from 17
countries.
The Trust identified seed samples in need of rescue by first
consulting scientific experts who specialize in particular crop
species and could identify the most important collections. The
Trust then asked individual crop gene banks maintaining those
collections to identify and regenerate the most threatened of
their unique samples.
Generally, a sample of a particular variety is considered
healthy if the number of living, viable seeds does not drop
below 85 percent of the sample’s original germination rate.
Declines greater than this imply loss of diversity, and a threat
to the very existence of the sample. Some of the samples of the
varieties that became the focus of the rescue effort had fallen
to below 50 percent germination rate, which means they must be
quickly
regenerated or they will be lost forever.
After the seeds have been regenerated, three sample lots are
prepared. One remains in the genebank carrying out the
regeneration. Another is sent to a gene bank meeting
international standards for seed preservation as a safety
duplicate. A third copy is sent to the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault, built by the government of Norway, operated by Nordgen
and supported financially and technically by the Trust. The
so-called Doomsday Vault is amassing a comprehensive fail-safe
collection of the world’s agricultural biodiversity.
Fowler said one benefit of the rescue initiative is that
producing new seeds requires growing the plant. This provides an
opportunity to gather and record information on its appearance
and performance that could help breeders and others determine
whether the sample may be of use to them in their work.
“We’re not preserving these samples to be museum pieces,” he
said. “Even when we are regenerating a variety ostensibly to
produce new seeds, breeders are looking at that plant for
certain qualities, such as heat resistance, drought tolerance,
weed or pest resistance, that could improve food production
right now.”
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and
availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to
the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and
diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization
working worldwide to solve this problem, and has already raised
over $140 million. For further information, please visit:
www.croptrust.org. |
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