The CGIAR Genebanks - Seeds for Life

The July 2006 Story of the Month will run for both July and August . We wish all our readers a peaceful and restful summer.

Among the many valuable public goods of the CGIAR that are put to work for the benefit of the world's poor are the 600,000 plus accessions of crop, forage and agroforestry species held in the genebanks of 11 of the CGIAR Centres (see Box). These collections represent the largest international effort on long-term conservation. Their huge reserves of diversity are rich in traditional varieties and landraces, non-domesticated species, obsolete cultivars, breeding lines and genetic stocks. Many of the accessions no longer exist elsewhere, having fallen out of use by farmers and/or become extinct.

The collections provide insurance to underwrite food security and human well-being in the future. Examples abound of leaps forward in crop productivity and quality, and in food security and human health, that have resulted from drawing on the CGIAR genebank riches. In the case of cereals alone, the Centres have used wild relatives to transfer desirable traits to a variety of crops such as the successful use by CIMMYT of Triticum polonicum to increase wheat spike size by 30-50%. ICARDA has transferred stripe and leaf rust resistance from wild Triticum species and from Aegilops speltoides into durum wheat. IRRI has incorporated disease and pest resistance traits, acid sulphate tolerance and male sterility from five wild rice species into commercial rice varieties.

The CGIAR genebanks have also come to the aid of war-ravaged countries including Angola, Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. Timely action by the Centres has helped restore agricultural production in these countries, just as it has in other locations in the aftermath of natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch impacting on Central America, and the many countries affected by the Asian tsunami.

The CGIAR genebanks hold a total of 629,022 accessions of crops and their wild relatives of which 594,686 are designated as in-trust, as shown below.

Collections in trust

The CGIAR collections originated as genetic resources to service the plant breeding programmes of the Centres; yet over time they have become of much wider significance due to their unique content, the extent to which they are characterised and documented, and their ease of availability. The CGIAR genebanks currently distribute up to 50,000 samples per year to researchers and plant breeders in national agricultural and research institutes north and south. Moreover, the genebanks are a focus for the gathering, refinement and sharing of knowledge and technologies, for capacity building, and for advanced research applying cutting-edge science.

The public goods status of the collections was affirmed in 1994 when they were placed in trust for the world community under interim agreements with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This status will be formalised on the occasion of the World Food Day celebrations in October 2006, when each Centre will sign a definitive in-trust agreement with the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Another important step enhancing the status of the collections was taken in June 2006, when the Governing Body adopted a simple, uniform contract - the Standard Material Transfer Agreement - that will facilitate access to the collections and trigger benefit-sharing payment of royalties within the multilateral System created by the Treaty. This opens up a new era of grater global collaboration based on transparency, good-will and trust.

Securing the resources

In becoming a partner in the in-trust agreements, the CGIAR made a weighty commitment, pledging to the world to secure the safety of the collections and make them accessible. The dynamic, vital nature of genetic resources is both their strength - they can be used without being used up - and their Achilles heel. Thus, they are not riches that can simply be placed under lock and key and withdrawn when needed; rather they need to be maintained under carefully controlled conditions to maintain their health and viability. Moreover, their full value can only be realised if their qualities be known and documented.

Most of the accessions in the collections can be stored as seed and require controlled conditions of temperature and humidity to maintain viability. However, a small but significant number of accessions, particularly of root and tuber crops, can only be stored as living plants or in vitro plantlets. These present particular challenges to maintain their viability and stability. Across the range of accessions, demanding maintenance routines are applied to check viability over time and to regenerate for conservation over extended periods and to generate material for use, with safety duplication of accessions at a second site to underwrite security. Thus, genebanking in the CGIAR is a complex undertaking both practically and conceptually with a significant cost, infrastructural demands and expertise requirements.

Strength through collective action

The CGIAR's comparative advantage in the genetic resources arena relates to both its unique genebank holdings and the capacity that the Centres have for concerted and timely action as in the case of the disasters cited above. The latter quality has also come to the fore in the context of meeting the in-trust commitments. For over a decade, this has been a central concern for the CGIAR genebanks and their convening mechanism the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme. From the time of its creation in 1994, the SGRP has addressed three critical issues regarding the collections: (i) transparent and ready availability to users, (ii) the achievement of high standards of conservation, and (iii) sustainability of funding in the long term.

The first of these issues led to the creation of SINGER, the System-wide Information Network for Genetic Resources. SINGER has assisted the Centres to standardize and document information on their collections, and apply web technologies to network their genebank data. Through SINGER, users have a single entry point for interrogating information on the collections and finding the diversity that they need to meet their breeding and other objectives.

As well as serving a key role in transparently meeting the in-trust commitments, SINGER is also emerging a powerful research tool and mechanism for monitoring dynamic process over time such as tracking the flow of material distributed from the collections. One recent study has, for example, shown that the principal beneficiaries of the CGIAR collections have been developing countries, representing more than 80% of all recipients. In addition, the flow of material from developed to developing countries is twice the rate of that in the opposite direction, and developing countries have requested the same material twice as frequently as developed countries, reflecting the important service of the CGIAR genebanks to national agricultural research needs in the developing world.

Investing in the future

In addressing the second issue on genebank standards, SGRP conducted a detailed review which revealed that, while the CGIAR collections were generally being maintained to high standards, there were concerns in terms of the quality of some genebank facilities, and there were backlogs in processing material into storage or through routine maintenance procedures and into safety duplication. This meant that the CGIAR genebanks' aspirations to set and adhere to best practices and to minimise risk to the collections were compromised. This problem was intimately linked to the third issue of security of long-term funding in a financial climate dependent on annual budgeting decisions. Accordingly, a strategic approach was urgently needed to upgrade the genebanks and relieve funding concerns.

To provide a rational foundation for developing a funding strategy, SGRP commissioned a costing study carried out by IFPRI and completed in 2001. This study has enabled the Centres to calculate their ongoing costs, and has also provided a much needed input into the arithmetic of conservation that is central to the efforts of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Founded by FAO and by IPGRI acting on behalf of the CGIAR, and emerging from an SGRP initiative, the Trust is mobilizing an endowment fund that will support important international collections in the CGIAR and elsewhere in perpetuity. But let us turn back to more immediate concerns: bringing the CGIAR genebanks up to standard.

Support from the World Bank

The SGRP review provided the genebanks with the information to set priorities and negotiate Centre support but the scale of the problem required a significant injection of additional funding. Fortunately this was forthcoming from the World Bank in the form of a grant of US$ 13.6 million to fund the "Global Public Goods Rehabilitation Project" (GPG I) . Running from mid-2003 and currently drawing to conclusion, the project has supported upgrading of critical genebank infrastructure and functions in the 11 Centres holding plant collections. These functions relate to conservation per se as well as health, characterization, information management and supply to users. An external review of the project in 2005 revealed substantial progress in meeting the project's goals. In a massive effort giving attention to nearly 50% of all in-trust accessions to improve the quality of their management, a total of 275,265 had been processed, of which 118,908 had been transferred to storage, 190,112 regenerated, 152,468 placed in safety back-up, 84,223 characterized, and 128,145 health tested. In parallel, several Centres have new and improved storage facilities, and the quality and quantity of information available on the collections have been improved. The 2006 report will be completed in 2007.

Down the road

A second phase project is in the works (GPG II) , and is proposed to run from 2007 to 2009, focusing on completing tasks relating to the security, management and accessibility of the collections, with attention to the assessment and management of risks. A platform for collaborative efforts will include a SINGER-based one-stop entry point for ordering from the collections. The project is foreseen as the final step in readying the collections for a sustainable future and as such is giving due attention to cost-effective management, especially regarding the collections held in common across the Centres.

The project targets its actions beyond the CGIAR through, for example, the development of guidelines on best practices with wide applicability in other collections. And a critical role is foreseen for the CGIAR Centres in the development of a global system for conservation and use of crop diversity as an instrument for development. FAO will be a key partner in this endeavour, which addresses specific goals of the International Treaty, the Global Plan of Action, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, that all represent landmarks along the long road of collaboration between the CGIAR and FAO on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

The CGIAR wishes to thank the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme for contributing this story.

Photo credits: top of page: CIP, middle: CIMMYT, bottom: CIMMYT.

Useful Links

• SINGER
• Global Crop Diversity Trust
• CGIAR images of genebanks