|
Safeguarding the "Crown
Jewels" of International Agriculture
Ten genebanks operated by CGIAR-supported Centers were the scene
of frenetic activity in recent weeks, as staff rushed to finish
packing samples of more than 200,000 crop varieties for shipment to
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a new storage facility
located on a remote island near the Arctic Circle.
"The troops here really busted their behinds, even during
the holiday break, to get the material out to Svalbard," said
Peter Hartmann, Director General of the International Institute of
Tropical Agriculture (IITA).
 Filling the Repository of Last Resort
Seeds of chickpea, common bean, cowpea, maize, potato, rice,
sorghum, sweetpotato, wheat and other food, forage and agroforestry
species are being stored at Svalbard to further guarantee their
safety, in addition to the already stringent procedures in place at
the CGIAR genebanks. These shipments are a first installment of
duplicates, representing a third of the approximately 600,000 plant
materials preserved by the Centers.
Intended to serve as a repository of last resort for
humanity's agricultural heritage, the SGSV is lodged deep
inside a mountain, beneath a thick layer of rock and of Arctic
permafrost, near the village of Longyearbyen on Norway's
Svalbard archipelago. The vault was built by the Norwegian
government as a service to the global community, in close
consultation with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will fund
the facility's operations. The latter is hosted jointly in Rome
by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Bioversity
International. The SGSV will open on February 26, 2008.
"Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive
array of diversity is a powerful testimony to the incredible work
of scientists at our Centers, who are so dedicated to ensuring the
survival of the world's crop diversity," said Emile
Frison, Director General of Bioversity International.
"The CGIAR collections are the 'crown jewels' of
international agriculture," said Cary Fowler, Executive
Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is covering the
costs of preparing, packaging and transporting CGIAR seeds to
Svalbard. "They represent the world's largest and most
diverse collections of common bean, cowpea, maize, potato, rice,
sweetpotato, wheat and other important food crops."
Plant genetic resources hard at
work
Collectively, the plant genetic resources preserved at 11 CGIAR
Centers constitute a powerful weapon for combating hunger, poverty
and environmental degradation through sustainable agricultural
growth. With back-up duplicates of many of these materials
sheltered at Svalbard, the CGIAR genebanks will also continue
protecting them, while keeping them actively at work.
The Centers facilitate the use of plant genetic resources
through liberal distribution of about 50,000 crop samples each year
to researchers, mainly in developing countries, and through close
collaboration with international and national crop improvement
programs around the world. Scientists in such programs employ
sophisticated research tools and global data networks to better
understand the plant genetic resources conserved, to identify
materials carrying genes for useful plant traits and to incorporate
these traits into improved crop varieties.
In every CGIAR Center engaged in crop improvement, examples
abound of how traditional varieties and wild relatives of crops
contribute to this work, with huge financial benefits for farmers
and consumers. To cite just one representative case, the potato
collection at CIP includes sources of resistance to late blight
disease, which caused the infamous Irish Potato Famine during the
19 th century and still results in crop losses worth millions of
dollars around the world. Resistant varieties developed and
disseminated by CIP have helped reduce those losses, and by
enabling farmers to lower the use of fungicides for late blight
control, they have also curbed damage to human health and the
environment. The potato collection contains sources of resistance
to other diseases as well, together with other valuable traits,
such as tolerance to cold, drought and soil salinity.
"With climate change, higher food prices and other
challenges," said Geoff Hawtin, acting director of CIAT and
former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust,
"our best available options for progress . . . lie in these
collections."
In addition to keeping options open for crop improvement, the
international genebanks have proved to be invaluable allies in
safeguarding national crop diversity collections. In the 1980s, for
example, when many Latin American countries facing economic
stagnation lacked funds for genebank maintenance, CIMMYT assisted
many of them in regenerating seed collections that were in danger
of being lost. This and other Centers - including CIAT, the
International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas
(ICARDA) and International Crops Research Institute for the
Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) - have also helped restore national
collections, as well as the technical capacity to maintain and use
them, in the aftermath of natural disasters and conflicts.
The biggest and the best
Below are brief descriptions of some of the Center collections -
which they hold in trust on behalf of humanity under the auspices
of the FAO - and of the materials they are sending to Svalbard:
- Containing 108,925 samples from 124 countries, the rice
collection held at the International Rice Research Institute at Los
Baños, the Philippines, is the world's largest; it constitutes
about 20 percent of the total rice holdings conserved in all
genebanks around the world. The IRRI collection includes 102,794
samples (mostly traditional varieties) of the Asian cultivated rice
Oryza sativa; 1,656 samples of the African cultivated rice
O. glaberrima; 4,475 samples of all known wild rice
species and hybrids between Oryza species; and 20 samples
of nine genera related to Oryza. Samples of about 70,000
of these materials - probably the single largest deposit - are
being sent to Svalbard in January-February 2008.
- The genebank maintained by the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center (CIMMYT) near Mexico City contains 150,000
unique samples of wheat and its wild relatives from more than 100
countries. This is the largest collection in the world for a single
crop. The maize collection represents nearly 90 percent of the
diversity of this crop in the Americas, its region of origin. In
addition to the 48,000 samples of wheat and 10,000 of maize on
their way to Norway by ship, CIMMYT will continue to send yearly
shipments until duplicates of the entire wheat and maize
collections have been deposited.
- The world's largest reservoir of root and tuber crop
genetic materials is held at the International Potato Center (CIP)
in Lima, Peru. It contains samples of about 2,000 wild and 5,000
cultivated potato types, 6,000 of sweet potato and more than 1,000
of other Andean root and tuber crops. Of these, the Center will
send -over a 4-year period beginning in January 2008 - 2,200
samples of wild potato, 3,650 of cultivated potato, 1,373 of wild
species related to potato and 3,797 of cultivated sweet
potato.
- The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) at
Palmira, Colombia, maintains 35,682 samples of beans, 6.499 of
cassava and 23,140 of tropical forages, mainly legumes and grasses
in its genebank. These three collections are the world's
largest and most diverse for their respective commodities. By
February 1, 2008, CIAT had sent (in the first of four shipments)
duplicates of 21,000 samples of Phaseolus beans and 9,000
of tropical forages, representing about 55 percent of the
Center's current holdings. Since cassava is conserved in
tissue-culture form rather than as seed, samples of this crop will
not be stored in the Svalbard facility.
- The genebank at IITA in Ibadan, Nigeria, contains cowpea and
its wild relatives - constituting the main collection - but also
Bambara groundnut, maize and soybean. With 15,122 samples from 88
countries, the cowpea collection is the world's largest for
this crop, representing about half of global cowpea diversity and
some 70 percent of Africa's traditional landraces. The crop
originated in this region, where it serves as a source of protein,
cash income and other benefits. IITA's shipment of 4,778
samples of cowpea, 294 of cowpea wild relatives, 673 of soybean,
499 of maize and 269 of Bambara groundnut was the first to reach
Norway in route to Svalbard. Like CIAT, IITA also conserves cassava
- as well as yam and Musa species (i.e., banana and
plantain), which cannot be accommodated at Svalbard, since they are
not conserved as seed.
- The genebank maintained at the International Crops Research
Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), headquartered near
Hyderabad, India, holds 118,882 samples of sorghum, pearl millet,
chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut and six small millets, along with
wild plants related to these crops. ICRISAT will deposit seeds of
20,000 germplasm samples in a first installment to be made in 2008.
Over a 5-year period, the Institute will transfer a total of about
110,000 germplasm samples.
- In its genebank at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the International
Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) maintains 18,000 seed and plant
samples of hardy tropical fodder and forage species. Those plants
are vital for enabling rural people to keep livestock and derive a
livelihood from the production of milk and meat. In January 2008,
ILRI shipped 4,000 duplicate samples from its collection, which
represents the world's largest and most diverse holdings of
fodders and forages from Africa.
Related Links:
|
