Endangered Crop Varieties Being Saved With Seed-Rescue Program

Thousands of endangered crop species are being saved for plant breeding in a seed-rescue program to help farmers in the developing world cope with food shortages, pests, disease and changing climate conditions.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust said it has agreements with organizations in 46 countries to rescue 53,000 rare varieties of “critical food crops” like wheat, barley, chickpea, rice, banana, yam and potatoes. Most of the seeds are at risk from lack of refrigeration, war and economic collapse, the trust said.

Agriculture in Africa and parts of Asia are threatened by drought and rising temperatures, according to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Seeds of little-used varieties may hold qualities that enable crops to adjust to the changing weather, the Global Crop Diversity Trust said.

“Growing conditions and food demands change rapidly and breeders never know which variety stored in a crop gene bank somewhere in the world is going to be that proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’ that will provide the critical trait that can literally make the difference between abundance and starvation,” Trust Executive Director Cary Fowler said yesterday.

About 236 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, or one in three there, are chronically hungry, according to the United NationsFood and Agriculture Organization.

Last year, Norway opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to protect crops from extinction caused by pollution, natural disasters and climate change. The vault can hold 4.5 million samples, or 2 billion seeds, and started with 268,000 samples comprising 100 million seeds, including potatoes and wheat.

Seed Vault

The Svalbard seed vault features three caverns blasted 130 meters (426 feet) into the permafrost outside the village of Longyearbyen.

Financial support for the Norwegian seed bank was provided by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose main funding comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Monsanto Co. is the world’s biggest seed producer and DuPont Co. the second.

Three samples of the seeds saved by the Global Crop Diversity Trust program will be prepared, including one batch going to the Norwegian vault and another to a gene bank meeting international standards as a safety duplicate.

One of the benefits of the Trust’s rescue efforts is being able to document the characteristics of the germinated seeds, which may help plant breeders in the future, the Trust said.

“We’re not preserving these samples to be museum pieces,” Fowler said