Biodiversity Trust Starts Off with a Bang

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

The minute they opened shop the cash began pouring in.

Plant geneticists hoped the World Summit on Sustainable Development would be an ideal occasion to galvanise support for their venture – the creation of an international trust to safeguard the world’s varied food crops. And they apparently were right.

Egypt first signed up, and pledged 250,000 U.S. dollars, followed by Switzerland, 10 million dollars and the U.N. Foundation guaranteeing 500,000 U.S. dollars – 10.75 million dollars in its first few minutes of existence. Not bad.

The Global Conservation Trust (GCT), as this venture is called, seeks to breathe life into the gene banks across the world. National, regional and international crop diversity collection centres will qualify for funding.

‘’Any gene bank group will be entitled to funding,’’ Geoffrey Hawtin, director-general of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), said after a meeting Thursday where the plans for the GCT were revealed. ‘’Even community farmers with gene banks can apply.’’

‘’This will assure food security,’’ added M.S. Swaminathan, a leading plant geneticist at the Indian Centre for Research on Sustainable Agricultural and Rural Development. ‘’The foundation has been laid for genetic security in the future.’’

Currently, there are 1,470 gene banks in nearly 150 countries, says Christopher Higgins, of London’s Imperial College, with some 5.4 million samples stored in them.

A U.S. government representative welcomed the move as a timely measure to stall the spread of poverty in the rural reaches of the world. ‘’I have been converted to this cause. And there is strong support in the White House for this,’’ said Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, during the meeting.

According to Hawtin, those behind the GCT – including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) – hope to raise 260 million U.S. dollars initially. The bulk of the money will be used to collect and preserve seeds for the gene banks.

The need for the GCT was amplified by a report released here yesterday that made a compelling case about the extent of agricultural biodiversity the planet has lost over the decades due to a range of factors.

‘’The world contains an estimated 250,000 species of flowering plants, but one in 12 of them (8 percent) now seem likely to disappear before 2025,’’ states ‘Crop Diversity at Risk: The Case For Sustaining Crop Collections,’ the report authored by Imperial College’s department of agriculture science.

According to FAO estimates, it adds, nearly ‘’three-quarters of the original varieties of agriculture crops have been lost from farm fields since 1900. And this trend has accelerated in the last half century.’’

On top of that, the FAO has discovered that many of the world’s gene banks are in various states of ‘’rapid deterioration’’, compounding the vulnerable state of global food security due to the narrowing of the food base.

And by November last year, the FAO had secured a measure to stall this course. The U.N. food agency’s 180-nation conference adopted the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, a document aimed at managing the world’s agricultural biodiversity.

Since then, 64 countries have signed the treaty and 12 have ratified it. The document needs 40 ratifications to go into force.

Yesterday’s launch of the GCT is being seen by some here as the next logical step in the process of ensuring crop diversity.