FAO: Ukraine Opens New Duplicate Centre to Safeguard National Plant Genetic Resources
11 November 2025
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Ukraine, with the financial support of the European Union (EU) and in partnership with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust), and Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) has officially opened the Duplicate Centre for Plant Genetic Resources of Ukraine and handed it over to the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences (NAAS).
The opening of the Duplicate Centre marks the second phase of the joint EU–FAO project launched in 2022 in response to the destruction of the National Gene Bank in Kharkiv. Following the emergency evacuation of 51,000 samples of long-term storage to a temporary site in western Ukraine, the new Centre now provides a permanent and secure home for these collections and forms the backbone of the country’s modernized plant genetic resources system.
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