Getting Genebanks Back Up on Their Feet
The journey of safeguarding crop diversity is a long and challenging one, with emergencies bound to arise – moments when genebanks face the dire risk of losing irreplaceable collections. In 2024, the Crop Trust and the International Plant Treaty stepped in to address such critical situations in Sudan and the Philippines, allocating over USD 90,000 through the collaboratively managed Emergency Reserve for Genebanks.
In Sudan, ongoing armed conflict severely endangered national food systems and the country’s agricultural legacy. Amid looming famine and crumbling infrastructure, the national genebank at the Agricultural Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Research Centre embarked on the arduous task of surviving. This facility safeguards over 17,000 accessions, including indigenous crop wild relatives, some of which were safety duplicated at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. To assist, the Emergency Reserve provided USD 20,500 to install a solar power system at the sub-national genebank in Elobeid for stable and independent energy access. The BOLD Project provided additional funds to pack seed samples, arrange transfer to the Port of Sudan, and shipment of seeds to Norway in 2024. NordGen helped prepare them for deposit into the Seed Vault.
In the Philippines, the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory (NPGRL) faced escalating challenges due to extreme weather events. With an average of 20 typhoons annually and a history of destructive floods and fires, the lab operated for years without a reliable backup power system. This put its collection of over 20,000 accessions at constant risk. In 2024, the Emergency Reserve committed USD 71,291 to support the installation of a power generator and freezers. These enhancements ensure that the country’s national repository for traditional and Indigenous varieties – many of which can no longer be found in the field – remains resilient against future storms and outages.
“If these crops vanish from the field, what alternatives would we have if they aren’t conserved? There’s no going back,” noted Hidelisa de Chavez, a researcher at NPGRL.
Established jointly by the Secretariat of the International Plant Treaty and the Crop Trust in 2021, the Emergency Reserve for Genebanks provides a funding mechanism that can respond rapidly whenever there is an imminent threat to collections of crop diversity that fall under the framework of the International Plant Treaty. The Emergency Reserve is a component of the BOLD Project. Discover more
