News

We recently visited our Crop Wild Relatives partners at the Mekong Delta Development Research Institute, Can Tho University, in Vietnam. Professor Huynh Quang Tin is leading a participatory plant breeding (PPB) initiative where 13...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science

Whenever the subject of the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the Treaty) comes up, I automatically think of the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire. The movie was...

Keeping up with the demand for rice seeds: The automation of seed sorting at the International Rice Genebank

To an untrained eye, all sheep in a paddock look alike. But shepherds can call all the sheep in their flock by name and...

Coffea arabica is a diverse species. Yet a 2014 study of farmed and wild plants found that only a fraction of the species’ genetic diversity is represented in cultivated coffees. Wild arabica is certain to hold many more...

Marie Haga | Marie's Corner

Most of us have some wild relatives in our families. I can think of some in my own. It’s the same with crops – they too have their wild sisters and brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. I will not speak...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science

I don’t like the International Day for Biological Diversity much.

I mean, I’m fine with the concept. It would of course be better if there were no need to regularly point out how important...

Recipient of the inaugural Crop Trust Legacy Award David Ellis was once asked how to prepare for a career as a genebank scientist. “There’s no fricking way,” he responded. “You not only have to be well grounded in science but you...

In March 1949, a group of experts started a special kind of coffee plantation on the land of the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) at Turrialba, in the center of Costa Rica. They planted 23...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science 

My mother-in-law, Hilda Gathoni, has been growing tea for most of her 83 years. The same tea. The tea she and her family also drink. It’s about one and a half hectares in the highlands above...

AfricaRice will open its new genebank later this year, in Mbe, Côte d’Ivoire, more than a decade after the center re-located to Benin during a civil war. But first, all its rice had to be sent back to Cote d’Ivoire after being...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science

Whenever a new report on some aspect or other of the food system comes out, the metaphors start flying around. We saw that recently with the EAT-Lancet report on what a healthy diet from a...

Donors, Pacific Community (SPC) scientists and the Crop Trust will meet in Suva, Fiji, at the end of March to discuss ways to raise money for the genebank of SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT).

CePaCT conserves a...