SAVING THE SEEDS FARMERS NEED

A Plan to Help Protect Biodiversity for the Developing World

In the past 50 years, plant breeders have made amazing advances, developing crops that are more nutritious and less susceptible to drought and disease. That’s the good news. But these advances also have an unintended consequence: As breeders develop better varieties, farmers stop using the old ones, which means that the very genetic material breeders need to keep making improvements is disappearing.

For some farmers, this isn’t an issue. In fact, much of the plant-genetic material in the world is preserved in gene banks; the seeds for 100,000 different varieties of rice are literally stored in freezers in warehouses around the world. Worldwide, about 1,500 gene banks store almost 5.5 million samples, about 2 million of which are unique.

But for farmers in the poorest and most distant places, preserving biodiversity is a major concern. We believe in the potential of better seeds to improve the lives of millions of people who suffer from hunger and poverty, and we are making grants to help more small farmers use them. But we are also committed to helping protect the crops that matter most to these communities—which means providing funding to help developing countries preserve their biodiversity.

To that end, we made a $30 million grant to the United Nations Foundation’s Global Crop Diversity Trust. This grant will help protect the biodiversity of those places that need it most and will work to ensure that small farmers can access this biodiversity.

In addition, it will allow the other gene banks to preserve the material they have while improving coordination across the gene-bank system. It will also upgrade existing gene banks and provide back-up storage in a top-of-the-line facility being built by Norway near the North Pole.

By holding in trust the world’s collection of plant-genetic material, this effort will guarantee that breeders can continue to develop crops that give billions of people better, healthier lives.