News

Tea-growing countries around the world would all be better served by sharing their knowledge and plant genetic material, according to Dr. Mahasen A B Ranatunga, Head of the Plant Breeding Division and Genebank at the Tea Research...

In-depth Audit Suggests Sustainable Way Forward For Key International Coffee Collection

For the past 71 years, the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), located at Turrialba in Costa Rica has been...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science

There’s been a lot of discussion during these past extraordinary months about the effect of the pandemic on the global food system. Such discussions often end in exhortations that “we mustn’t...

The genebank of the International Potato Centre (CIP) holds more than 6000 accessions of potatoes and distributes samples to users all over the world. But CIP often doesn’t hear back from those recipients of diversity.

“It’s...

“Everybody in Bangladesh loves carrots: all social classes, all ages, all religions, all casts,” says M.A. Rahim, a professor at the Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU). Rahim was the first plant breeder in the country to...

Safeguarding the foundation of our food system for future generations.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway (27 August 2020) - A unique 100-year experiment launches today at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The experiment, the first...

Last year, the CGIAR Genebank Platform completed the third year of its five-year lifespan. The Platform ensures that the CGIAR genebanks are running efficiently, that the crop collections they manage are conserved to a high...

How do you go about finding and collecting seeds from a scraggly looking crop wild relative in a prairie or a tropical forest, when you’ve never done it before? Once you’ve collected them, how do you keep track of the seeds...

A recent summit entitled Genetic diversity for more resilient food systems looked at the urgent need of safeguarding crop diversity due to the impact of climate changes on food production. Representatives of genebanks from around...

By Stefan Schmitz, Executive  Director of Crop Trust and Tony Simons, Director General of World Agroforestry

We have all heard the figures: by 2050, the world’s population is expected to increase to nearly 10 billion, and most...

This slideshow presents a brief, but wide-ranging, look at the importance of alfalfa in Chile’s Magallanes region. More specifically, it highlights how and why our partners at the Institute for Agricultural Research (INIA) are...

Genesys, the online portal for information on genebank samples, is constantly evolving. First launched in 2008, it now contains data on more than four million accessions and counting, which is over half of the estimated total...