Preserving stocks in perpetuity
Local crop varieties, known as ‘landraces’, are the result of generations of careful farmer selection. Due to a combination of environmental and social changes in farming communities, and the intensification and harmonization of farming practices, large numbers of crop wild relatives and local crop varieties are disappearing at an alarming rate.
For decades, local, regional and international efforts have been attempting to preserve this valuable agrobiodiversity for future generations by setting up collections of genetic resources, called genebanks. There are currently about 1,750 institutional crop collections around the world, as well as a number of community-based seed bank initiatives, such as Debal Deb’s indigenous rice varieties seed bank project in Odisha, India.
From the outset, CGIAR institutes have been involved in studying and preserving the biodiversity of their respective mandate crops. Some 710,000 accessions of cereals, legumes, roots and tubers, trees and other essential staple crops are stored in CGIAR international collections. All accessions within these collections are international public goods, available under the terms and conditions negotiated by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
Preserving these seed collections involves carrying out routine core activities, such as checks on seed health, planting to ensure seed viability and purity and good storage techniques. Adequate and continuous support is crucial for proper maintenance of the gene banks. Charlotte Lusty explained that the Global Crop Diversity Trust endowment was set up to offer sustainable funding for development and maintenance of the 11 existing CGIAR gene banks. The 5-year CGIAR Research Program for Managing and Sustaining Crop Collections (the Genebank CRP) will cover the expenses of maintaining the genebanks until the endowment takes over financial responsibility for the core costs of managing and sustaining the international collections, ‘in perpetuity’, for the benefit of future generations.
As well as ensuring proper maintenance and development of international collections, the new CRP will continue to strengthen collaboration between CGIAR and national and regional genebanks, so as to help them secure their collections for long-term conservation.
Storing and using genebank resources
The genebanks are not just biodiversity safes, preserving genetic resources for the future. They can also provide direct help to farming communities, for example by reintroducing ‘extinct’ landraces, or by providing material for crop breeding programs. And against a backdrop of climate change and other global challenges, and the need to consider social factors, such as consumer preferences and reduced cooking time for pulses, there has never been a greater need for as many crop variety options as possible.
Charlotte believes there is significant potential for using the vast diversity housed in CGIAR collections. The collections harbor traits that include drought and heat tolerance, nutritional quality, disease resistance and other characteristics that can contribute to more sustainable and productive agriculture.
Innovations are helping to improve management of the massive gene bank resources so as to respond to user requests in a more efficient way. Cases in point include the mini core collection approach and the Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) methodology, which will help to enhance the use of collections by plant breeders.
Although quantifying the impact of CGIAR genebanks on food security is no easy task, there are plenty of examples of how these resources are making a difference to farmers’ livelihoods and agricultural output. In Kenya, napier (or elephant) grass – a valuable fodder crop for thousands of smallholder dairy farmers – has suffered from attacks by a devastating smut fungal disease. The Kenyan Agriculture Research Institute was able to develop disease resistant varieties of this tropical grass after accessing napier grass germplasm housed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)’s fodder crops genebank. Meanwhile, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) analyzed 4,317 rice varieties and found that 100 per cent of the varieties released by IRRI and 90 per cent of non-IRRI varieties had at least one genebank accession in their pedigree.
Participants at the CGIAR stakeholder workshop last month, during which the Genebank CRP was presented, were keen to learn about existing interactions between this and other CRPs, since crop diversity could be used to achieve better resilience, adaptation and food and nutrition security.
There is scope for such interaction in supporting crop breeding efforts, as well as through the systems perspective. Subsistence farmers, whom CRPs aim to lift out of hunger and poverty, often depend on local traditional staple crop varieties. Preserving or restoring this crop diversity, in spite of changes in farming systems, may improve the resilience of farming households and give them better prospects for food security.
One recommendation to emerge from the presentation was for more sustained dialog between biodiversity actors and CRP stakeholders, so as to integrate the value of biodiversity into future CGIAR research for development.
Charlotte Lusty, from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, presented Genebanks, the CGIAR Research Programme (CRP) for Managing and Sustaining Crop Collections maintained by CGIAR Centers to CGIAR stakeholders in Montpellier, France on June 24. #LELP2013 #Ag4Dev
Photo credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)