Together with the air we breathe and the water we drink, crop diversity is one of the most fundamentally important resources for human life on earth.This diversity is awe inspiring - there are more than 200,000 varieties of wheat alone. It provides the natural, biological basis of our ability to grow the food required today, as well as to meet the challenges of population growth, changing climates and constantly evolving pests and diseases.

No country in the world is self-sufficient in crop diversity – agriculture everywhere depends on it. Yet this diversity, contained and stored in seeds, is at risk of disappearing. But we don’t have to sit back and let this happen.
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Less food, more people - action needed now

By 2050, if climate change continues on its current trajectory, world supplies of rice, corn, and wheat - sometimes called the Big Three because together they provide half of the planet's food calories - could shrink dramatically. Yet funding to find solutions has repeatedly been slashed. "The most important science is growing food. Civilization depends on it. It's foolish, shortsighted to ignore that. We've been complacent."
Read more in the National Journal

Preparing for climate change

Crop diversity provides the means for adapting crops to rapidly changing climates, yet much of this genetic storehouse remains untapped – largely because it has yet to be adequately characterized and evaluated. For a second year, the Trust is offering grants to screen collections for vital traits.
Call for proposals

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Spud's best yet to come

The humble potato, in all its thousands of varieties, is gaining importance for developing nations. Amid the growing food crisis, potato prices have remained relatively stable, and experts say the potato has yet to realise its full potential as a global food source.
Check out the BBC Picture Gallery

Keep Fighting Hunger

Former Head of USAID and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate issue call for increased investment in agriculture, and a dramatic acceleration in the research needed to develop seeds more resistant to climatic stresses such as drought. Crop diversity will be essential in the fight against hunger, poverty and desperation.
Read the Wall Street Journal article

World's poor pay price for budget cuts

The fight against the pests which destroy harvests, as well as to ready agriculture for climate change, is harmed as budgets for research and the conservation of crop diversity are cut.
Read the New York Times article

A looming catastrophe

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug has issued a stark warning about wheat stem rust. The crop disease, which has has caused major famines throughout history, is on the march again, threatening to push all food prices even higher and cause further misery for the world's poor. Borlaug has called for more funds to avoid the looming catastrophe by developing rust-resistant varieties, using the world's seedbanks to search for resistance.
Read the New York Times article

The Mother of all Rice

Japanese sculptor Mitsuaki Tanabe has generously donated an extraordinary 9-metre solid steel sculpture of a grain of wild rice, which he has installed at the entrance to the Trust's offices within the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The amazing, and dangerous, creative process used a technique unique to Tanabe, which involves operating at about 3,000 degrees.
See photos and read more in the Japan Times

The new face of hunger

Food prices are causing misery and unrest around the world. With a limited amount of fallow land easily available, food increases now need to come mainly from higher yields. More productive varieties are not available to farmers unless research work had been going on for years. And due to funding cuts, it has not.
Read The Economist article

CBS 60 Minutes - To the end of the Earth to save humankind



Starting at the Arctic Seed Vault, the investigative journalists from CBS 60 Minutes take a journey into the world of crop diversity conservation - and reveal the scale and the urgency of the challenge.