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Papa Dewi looked out at fields covered with a kaleidoscope of crops: rice, cowpea, eggplant, maize, and more. “This is our way of life,” said the Dayak farmer from Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan. “This is malan.”

Malan means...

June 3, 2024 – Bonn, Germany – The Crop Trust is delighted that, following a review of the patronages of the late Queen and the former Prince of Wales, His Majesty King Charles III has decided to continue to be its Patron....

Is there a food that’s more emblematic of Peru than the potato? Long, round, bumpy, yellow, purple, red. Every imaginable shape and color is on the menu. And the women there know how to prepare them.

I have been in Peru doing...

Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, Norway, 28 May 2024 – The Svalbard Global Seed Vault welcomes shipments from five new depositors as the world’s largest repository of crop diversity raises the number of samples in its care to...

In this installment of our Seed Heroes series, we remember the unique contributions of Peruvian scientist Carlos Ochoa, whose hazardous collection expeditions in search of wild potatoes paved the way for many of today’s improved...

Des Moines, Iowa — May 9, 2024 — The World Food Prize Foundation has announced that two of the Crop Trust’s foundational figures, Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin and Dr. Cary Fowler, will receive the 2024 World Food Prize for their...

Genebanks are generally safe. But they are not invulnerable.

More than a decade ago, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas’ (ICARDA) genebank got caught up in the civil war in Syria, and scientists...

NordGen hosted a meeting with the Ukrainian genebank and several international experts to find a way forward for securing Ukraine's plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, which are at risk due to the war. Focus of the...

Twenty years ago, ‘biodiversity’ was a niche term that was mainly used in scientific circles. Now, we – well, some of us – discuss the relative merits of heirloom apples and ancient cereals in supermarket check-out lines. This...

Ensuring food security and the resilience of agriculture against environmental challenges relies on the preservation and use of crop diversity. Genebanks are the ultimate guardians of this diversity. However, they face a myriad of...