Call for Action: Secure the Financing of Genebanks to Strengthen Resilient, Productive, Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems

3 July 2025

SEVILLE, SPAIN, 03 July 2025  – The UN Conference on Finance for Development in Seville 2025 brings governments, international financial institutions and development actors together at a critical moment. It aims to align financial systems and investments with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), close the funding gap for global public goods, and mobilize long-term resources for resilient, inclusive development.

So the conference is about delivering on the SDGs, not in words, but in budgets. It is about political will, priority-setting, collective responsibility and collective action. It is about recognizing that global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss and growing freshwater scarcity cannot be addressed in isolation from each other. They require collaboration and sustained, strategic investment.

SDG 2.5 at Risk – Our Crop Diversity is Disappearing

In this context, SDG Target 2.5, which calls for the conservation of the genetic diversity of crops by 2020, stands out as one of the most clearly missed targets. According to the Third Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture released earlier this year, the loss of farmers‘ varieties and landraces is continuing all over the world, with regions such as Southern Africa, the Caribbean and Western Asia being in particular affected.

Genebanks – critical institutions for safeguarding plant genetic diversity – remain dramatically underfunded in many countries, and indeed at the international level. Unique and valuable collections of crop diversity are often at risk. The very building blocks of future food systems are being lost before they can be used to achieve not only SDG 2 Zero Hunger, but also SDG 13 Climate Action and SDG 15 Life on Land. 

Crop diversity is the raw material for breeding climate-resilient, nutritious, and locally adapted crops, and for diversifying agriculture and diets. Access to crop diversity means options, resilience, adaptation, and recovery – especially important in times of crisis, whether caused by drought, war or market shock, and where precious resources can be lost in the blink of an eye.

Genebanks: Silent Pillars of Resilient Food Systems

From local seed banks to global repositories, genebanks around the world conserve crop diversity for the benefit of all humanity, forever. Maintaining these collections requires stable and long-term finance. Cold storage facilities, skilled staff, equipment, digital infrastructure and scientific partnerships all cost money. Without investment, crop diversity and knowledge is being lost, and with them, our ability to innovate. Safeguarding the remaining crop diversity and ensuring we can use it to address challenges being faced by farmers and our global food system right now requires immediate funding increases. We cannot save what’s already been lost. But we can accelerate the safeguarding and availability of the diversity that remains by adequately funding genebanks.

Global Public Goods Require Global Finance

Genebanks are not just national assets. They serve humanity. Yet too often, they are treated as afterthoughts or as short-term projects. This once-in-a-decade gathering of leaders in Seville must change this. It must mark the start of a new era where the conservation of our crop diversity is no longer the weakest link in global food security, but a strong foundation.

We call on public and private leaders to act now to:

1. Recognize genebanks as essential infrastructure for sustainable development, climate resilience and global security.
2. Secure long-term funding for national and international genebanks, including through Official Development Assistance, climate and biodiversity finance, and multilateral development banks.
3. Modernize and connect genebanks, enabling full participation in global systems and research partnerships.
4. Integrate SDG Target 2.5 into financing frameworks as a cross-cutting enabler of agricultural transformation and climate adaptation.
5. Promote the active use of crop diversity, linking conservation with innovation, breeding and food systems transformation.
6. Fully support the Global Crop Diversity Trust as the generally recognised funding mechanism that ensures the conservation and use of critical crop diversity in perpetuity.

Everything starts with seeds. But seeds need nurturing.

 

Categories: For The Press, For Partners, Press Releases, Food Security