Securing Our Food Forever
Safeguarding Crop Diversity For A Secure Future
Conserving crop diversity is more urgent than ever in a world facing concurrent challenges of climate change, conflict and food insecurity.
Crop diversity underpins our food system. It provides the raw material needed to adapt agriculture to changing climates, to improve yields and to ensure food security and healthy nutrition for all.
The diversity of our crops is rapidly declining due to climate change, environmental degradation, new pests and diseases, and socio-economic pressures. Loss of crop diversity jeopardizes global food security, making it imperative to take action now.
The Solution
The Crop Trust is an international non-profit organization committed to safeguarding the world's crop diversity. Through a robust worldwide network of over 130 partners, the Crop Trust works to conserve the genetic diversity of crops essential for food security and make it available for smallholder farmers, public sector plant breeders, researchers, and the private sector. The Crop Trust was established in 2004 and has since provided financial and technical support to genebanks around the world.
Securing The Future
The Crop Trust mission is vital. We enable our partners to conserve the world's crop diversity in perpetuity. Our mission supports global efforts to adapt agriculture to the climate crisis, reduce environmental degradation, halt the loss of biodiversity, and improve lives and livelihoods. By securing crop diversity, the Crop Trust helps ensure that we can feed a growing population sustainably and nutritiously.
Funding Food Forever
The Crop Trust manages the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund, which provides stable, long-term funding for genebanks worldwide. This fund ensures that key genebanks, including the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, can operate at high standards, safeguarding essential crop varieties for future generations. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (International Plant Treaty) recognizes the Endowment Fund as an essential element of its funding strategy.
Let’s Not Put All of Our Eggs In One Basket
Fewer than 200 edible plants now make a major contribution to food production and just nine account for two-thirds of food production. Focusing on just a few crops, and on just the latest varieties of each crop, limits our ability to respond to challenges and keep our food systems viable and resilient. If we lose crop diversity, we lose our options for diversifying agriculture, and creating new, tastier, more nutritious, more resilient and higher yielding varieties.
The Global Genebank Partnership
By working together, genebanks can better address the global need for crop diversity and ensure that agricultural systems are resilient and sustainable. To enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of genebanks, the Crop Trust fosters a Global Genebank Partnership. This initiative promotes technical cooperation, knowledge sharing, capacity development and stronger connections among stakeholders to create a cohesive system that maximizes the impact of genebanks.
The Tip of the Iceberg
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the world's backup facility for the crop diversity conserved in genebanks. With over 1.2 million seed varieties already secured, the Seed Vault ensures that no crop variety is lost forever, acting as a global insurance policy against calamity.
The Seed Vault was established and is owned by Norway. It is operated in a partnership between the Norwegian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the regional genebank of the Nordic Countries (NordGen), and the Crop Trust.
A Global Network
The Crop Trust works with 96 technical partners—mainly international, regional,national and other genebanks—in 65 countries. Since 2006, the Crop Trust has provided more than USD 75 million to international genebanks primarily through our Endowment Fund and, in 2023, provided over USD 16 million in funding for projects and other activities that strengthen the conservation and use of crop diversity around the world. This global network helps farmers, researchers, and plant breeders develop resilient crop varieties that can withstand the challenges posed by climate change.
For two decades, the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund has underpinned these endeavors with guaranteed support to some of the world’s most critical international genebanks. To date, the Endowment Fund has received USD 260 million in contributions and has a total estimated value of USD 317 million.
In addition to the Endowment Fund, the Crop Trust also raises funds for, and implements, short-term projects.
BOLD
The Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development project, or BOLD, takes a multi-pronged and global approach to support the conservation and use of crop diversity.
- BOLD works with national genebanks in Africa, Asia and Latin America to strengthen their capacity to manage, document, conserve and back up the crop diversity that they hold.
- BOLD provides financial and technical support to partners around the globe to help them regenerate seeds from their collections and to back them up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for long-term safekeeping.
- The Crop Trust and the Secretariat of the International Plant Treaty have provided emergency funding to genebanks in urgent need in Laos, Ukraine, the Philippines and Yemen through the Emergency Reserve for Genebanks.
BOLD partners are broadening the genetic base of alfalfa, barley, durum wheat, finger millet, grasspea, potato and rice. For example, in Morocco, durum wheat and barley varieties including diversity from wild relatives show up to 20% higher yields and superior nutritional value under severe drought conditions, showcasing the potential of using diversity.
International Genebanks
The Endowment Fund empowers some of the world’s most important genebanks, including:
- Nine CGIAR genebanks, which hold some of the world’s largest and most intensively studied and used collections of crop diversity, totaling over 750,000 samples of rice, wheat, maize, potatoes, beans, bananas and countless other crops.
- The Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees in Fiji, which assists Pacific Island countries and territories to conserve and distribute the diversity of the region’s staple crops, including taro and yam.
- The International Coffee Collection at CATIE in Costa Rica, where scientists are exploring ways to future-proof the world’s favorite cup of ‘morning fuel’ through the use of the wild and cultivated diversity safeguarded there.
To qualify for perpetual funding to fully cover a genebank’s essential operations, genebanks need to meet performance targets set by the Crop Trust. Three such partnerships have been established: with IRRI (2018), with IITA (2023), and with The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (2023). These partnerships benefit billions of people and safeguard thousands of varieties of rice, beans, forages and sub-Saharan African food crops, including lesser-known opportunity crops.
Genebank Data
Data is the lifeblood of crop diversity conservation and use. Without it, genebanks would not be able to manage their collections effectively. In turn, plant breeders and researchers need information on what diversity is held where, and what its characteristics are, so they can make informed choices about what to use. The Endowment Fund supports the development of Genesys, the one-stop-shop platform for data on the crop diversity conserved in genebanks, and GRIN-Global Community Edition (GGCE), a genebank management tool that can be tailored to every genebank’s needs.