Our work

Global Crop Conservation Strategies guide global conservation of genetic resources for key crops. In 2022, five new strategies and two updated strategies were completed and three others were in the final stages of production.

Launched in September 2021, Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development (BOLD) is a 10-year project, that builds on the successes and achievements of the Crop Wild Relatives Project to strengthen food and nutrition security worldwide.

Seeds for Resilience is a five-year project supporting collections of key crops identified by partner genebanks in five sub-Saharan African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia. In 2022, Seeds for Resilience entered its third year of activities.

In 2022, the “Safeguarding crop diversity for food security: Pre-breeding complemented with Innovative Finance” Project entered its fourth and final year.

A new project is preserving sweetpotato landraces from Madagascar and Zambia, cleaning them of diseases so they can yield better, and putting them back into the hands of farmers.

In 2022, no fewer than 30 genebanks from 28 countries deposited a total of nearly 85,000 seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Information systems are central to the effective conservation and use of plant genetic resources, whether at the level of the individual collection, using the likes of GRIN-Global, or at a global level, like Genesys. The Crop Trust’s work on both types of system made significant strides in 2022.

The Crop Trust made a number of important institutional strides forward in 2022, including: receiving an endowment contribution from a private company; signing of a memorandum of understanding with CGIAR; and issuing the first grant under the Emergency Reserve Fund.

It was a challenging year for investment markets due to geopolitical turmoil, rising interest rates and inflationary pressures. However, the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund was set up with a long-term perspective in mind, and can withstand short-term market fluctuations and still achieve its objectives.

The Crop Trust continues to work on initiatives to deepen its network of government donors and establish partnerships with the private sector, NGOs and multilateral development institutions, both in terms of potential sources of funding, as well as platforms for raising awareness of the importance of crop diversity, and indeed advocacy.