Monday, November 5, 2007 - 9:50 AM
84-1

Current Status.

Cary Fowler, Global Crop Diversity Trust, FAO, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, Italy

Both the number of genebanks and the samples they store have risen dramatically since the early 1970s. Conditions in most genebanks fall short of meeting international standards. Unintended redundancy and inefficiencies are ubiquitous at the global level. Collections are threatened by many factors, including lack of reliable funding and comprehensive information systems, as well as the absence of coordination, oversight and accountability. In short, there is no effective, rational global system for ensuring the conservation and availability of crop diversity for breeding and research. This is particularly troubling given the increasing challenges faced by agriculture. Key elements of such a conservation system exist, however, and are being knitted together, providing grounds for optimism.

 

Countries remain highly interdependent on each other for the crop diversity that underpins modern plant breeding programs. Restrictions on access to these resources may be easing, facilitating a more cooperative and cost-efficient approach to conservation and supply of plant genetic resources.

 

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is assembling an endowment and making grants to underwrite the conservation of priority collections, with the aim of ensuring that the genepool of each crop is conserved in perpetuity and made available, legally and practically, to interested plant breeders and researchers. The paper discusses the Trust’s initiatives to help shape and secure a lasting system for conserving and making available crop diversity globally.


Back to Symposium--Crop Genetic Vulnerability Thirty Five Years after T-Cytoplasm
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Back to The ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meetings (November 4-8, 2007)