Crop trust aims to raise millions to avoid climate change 'catastrophe'

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Crop trust aims to raise millions to avoid climate change 'catastrophe'

While world leaders last week attended the UN Climate Change Summit in New York, the word's foremost food security organization was undertaking a monumental task to protect crop diversity and provide resources to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons

Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons

The Global Crop Diversity Trust runs more than 1,700 seed gene banks around the world and is framed by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

It is also predominantly in charge of the world-famous Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a Norwegian archipelago near the Arctic Circle; the back up for the global system in case disaster strikes any of the 14 international agricultural research centers for specific crops.

The Trust's mission is very simple - to conserve and make available the diversity of all the crops we eat.

A study carried out in 1983 to count U.S. crop diversity showed that since 1903, 93% of the known fruit and vegetable varieties had gone extinct.

The reason why it is so important to protect diversity is mainly due to the effects of climate change on our global agricultural system. Scientists and breeders will need a wealth of genetic diversity available to them in order to create new varieties better suited to a changing environment.

For example, there exist around 200,000 varieties of rice in the world, but it may be just a single one of them that breeders need to adapt rice to higher temperatures, or to new diseases stemming from climate change.

Crop diversity is essentially a prerequisite for adapting agriculture to new challenges and thereby feeding the world.

The task now facing the Crop Trust is procuring the funds needed in order to keep the gene banks running forever. The vast majority of these funds are contributed by governments around the world.

The organization says an endowment of US$500 million is needed by the end of 2016 in order to keep the 14 agricultural researcher centers and the Svalbard vault running, using an average investment return of 4% - or US$20 million - per annum.

The endowment fund currently contains around US$170 million.

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Entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Credit: Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust

In order to fill the US$330 million gap, the Crop Trust is trying to establish relationships with governments around the world to convince them to support the cause.

At www.freshfruitportal.com, we caught up with communications manager Luis Salazar during his visit to the Chilean capital of Santiago to seek a financial contribution from the government.

"What we are doing is conserving diversity now and forever," Salazar said.

"It's a doable thing – we know exactly how much money we need to conserve diversity of crops forever, and that is US$20 million a year. With that amount we can make sure that the international gene banks are running and we have Svalbard running."

Salazar added the Global Crop Diversity Trust had teams of scientists to make sure the gene banks are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible, along with reviews of centers by other gene bank managers who make recommendations.

A long-term solution

In order to decide which governments to approach and how much support to request, the organization came up with a burden-sharing chart based on the World Bank model, which takes into account various factors like population, consumption, production, and it came up with the 'top' 50 countries, along with a recommended figure each country could contribute.

For example, Chile's recommended contribution is US$570,000 while China's is US$7.24 million, Mexico's is US$2.12 million, and the U.S.'s is US$126.26 million.

The Trust has already received some level of support from 14 countries, including the U.S., Australia, Germany, Egypt, the U.K, Ethiopia, and India, but currently has no representation in Latin America.

Despite the worthy cause, Salazar said one problem in obtaining government support was due to the large time scale of the project.

"A lot of funders want to see results in the next two or three years, due to the way the political systems are structured," he said.

"Our mission and the gene banks' is a long-term solution."

Once the US$500 million endowment has been reached, the second phase is to raise a further US$350 million in order to be able to fund not only the international centers, but the the national and regional gene banks too.

Hell on our hands

Salazar emphasized that while these figures may seem high, it was of vital importance to humanity's future food supply to reach them.

"If something goes wrong like it did in the 19th century in Ireland you need to go back to the source, because over there they only grew one or two types of potato and they didn't have the resistant gene - maybe some in Peru did," he said.

"If you start looking, what are the pests, what are the diseases that are affecting wheat, or affecting bananas, we don't have answers for some of them. Researchers are currently looking for answers right now.

"The problem is that we don't know in 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now what our needs will be. And that is why it's urgent to conserve diversity now, before it disappears. It can disappear for several reasons and one of them is because of the way we do agriculture – in a very monoculture way."

He added that rising global temperatures were predicted to have disproportionately severe effects on the yields of some major crops like rice.

"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a temperature increase of 1% is going affect yield of rice down 10%. But we're not expecting 1%; we're expecting 3 or 4%, and this is according to the World Bank which is very cautious in its estimations.," he said.

"So how will that hit our production? It could be catastrophic, and if we can't produce enough food that is going to turn into social unrest, conflict, prices rising, and we will have hell on our hands.

"We need to conserve to produce to make sure we have the food and to do that we need to adapt to the changes that the climate throws at us."

The GENESYS project

In addition to raising funds and running the gene banks, the Crop Trust is also trying to increase its global information system called GENESYS - an online portal that links gene banks worldwide.

The system acts as the crucial link between conservation and use, making the process for any scientist or breeder searching for new varieties far easier and more efficient.

GENESYS is already composed of data from the U.S., Europe, and international gene banks, but the Crop Trust is seeking to expand it to include every gene bank throughout the world.

www.freshfruitportal.com

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