Our Mission
Our mission is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. The fight against hunger is one of the greatest challenges facing the world over the coming decades. Crop diversity is fundamental to defeating hunger and achieving food security. But it is at serious risk.
An increasingly unpredictable and changing climate, and a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, will place unprecedented demands on agriculture. Conserving the vast diversity of crop varieties is the only way to guarantee that farmers and plant breeders will have the raw materials needed to improve and adapt their crops to meet these challenges - and provide food for us into the future.
The conservation of crop diversity is neither technologically complicated, nor, considering the importance of the task, expensive. The varieties of many of the most important crops can be simply stored as seed in freezers. It is instead the reliability of funding which is so crucial to conserving seed, as even short-term breaks in funding can lead to cutbacks in basic maintenance and the loss of unique varieties. Currently, with no secure funding, many of the world's 1500 genebanks know neither what is being stored on their shelves, nor even whether the seed is alive or dead.
And there is only one organization working worldwide to solve this problem - the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The Trust's response is to raise an endowment, the interest from which is enough to guarantee the effective conservation - and vitally, the ready availability to those who wish to use it - of the biological basis of all agriculture. The endowment will ensure that the conservation of this most critical resource is placed forever on a firm foundation.
Providing the backdrop to the Trust's action is an international consensus on the importance of this issue. Nations of the world have adopted a number of international agreements recognizing the need to conserve crop diversity and confirming the important role of collections maintained in genebanks. Among these are the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (1996); and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2001). Achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the priorities for development agreed by all members of the United Nations, will require crop diversity to be effectively conserved, and the Trust directly contributes to three of the goals: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger (Goal 1), to ensure environmental sustainability (Goal 7) and to develop a global partnership for development (Goal 8).