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For almost as long as there has been agriculture, farmers have stored seeds to plant the following year in case of an unforeseen loss of crops. Plant genebanks add modern techniques to this ancient practice to ensure the safety of our food supply.

Genebanks, which store both seeds and cuttings, preserve the genetic diversity of plants, increase the odds that food crops can be restored following a global catastrophe, and provide an important resource for scientists. Their libraries of samples can be utilized to produce more productive crops and varieties resistant to pathogens or changes in climate.

How Genebanks Work
Genebanks safeguard their seed and plant tissues in fortified locations around the world. Their holdings are stored at -18°C in freezers or at -196°C in liquid nitrogen, where they can survive for long periods of time, some up to hundreds of years. But all will periodically have to be renewed by planting and harvesting new specimens.

There are over 1,400 genebanks across the globe. Some work to protect local plants, while others operate globally. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), established in 1971, has 47 member countries with 11 genebanks containing over 650,000 items.

Why We Need Genebanks
Genetic diversity is essential to any group of organisms—if all were identical, one pathogen or environmental event could destroy them all. A diverse population is more likely to have individuals capable of surviving and passing on that ability to the next generation. In the modern world, however, the effort to improve food crops has resulted in monoculture, where one particular variety of many plants has become widespread.

Throughout the history of agriculture, over 7,000 species of plants have been used as food crops, but today only about 150 are represented in significant amounts. Of these, just nine—rice, maize, wheat, potato, sweet potato/yam, barley, sorghum/millet, sugar cane and soybean—produce 75% of plant-derived foods, and 30 are responsible for 95% of the total. While some of these plants do have many different variations (there are over 100,000 varieties of rice), much of the world’s plant-based food supply has rested with just a few crops.

As local growers replace native plants with varieties that have been proven to produce, a short-term gain has been achieved at the risk of possible future disaster. Disease and pests can spread around the world much quicker, climate change will alter growing conditions, and new pathogens periodically emerge. Without genetic diversity, plants will have difficulty adapting to these changes and surviving.

Older versions of crops, as well as their wild relatives, still have value. Plants resistant to disease, drought and other adverse conditions have been produced by crossing a crop plant with a naturally resistant wild relative. For example, a wild potato plant immune to the blight responsible for the Irish Potato Famine was used to restore potato crops, and in the 1970s, similar techniques were used to counteract pathogens killing rice in Asia and corn in the US. If these wild relatives are lost, a valuable resource will not be available to help with the next outbreak.

Where Are the Major Genebanks
The In the US, the Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) consists of local field sites and a base collection in Fort Collins, Colorado, holding more than 500,000 units representing almost 7,000 species.

The US site is dwarfed, however, by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or Doomsday Vault. It is designed to preserve critical plant specimens in case of a global catastrophe. Opened in February 2008, it has the capacity to store 4.5 million different seeds with priority given to food crops. Svalbard, chosen because of its potential to survive most natural and man-made disasters, is a remote archipelago off the northern coast of Norway. The facility consists of three large chambers in a 390-foot tunnel drilled into the permafrost on the side of a mountain.  Because of this, the facility never rises above -3.5°C, and should be safe from any potential rise in sea levels or increase in global temperatures.

The modern world presents a variety of dangers to all plants, including those critical to our food supply. The timeless practice of storing seeds, being continued in the form of plant genebanks, allows the restoration of key species following a disaster, protects the diversity found in the plant kingdom, and guarantees the safety of one of the planet’s most valuable asset—and an asset critical to human survival.

Additional resources:
Global Crop Diversity Trust
Biodiversity International
Heirloom Seeds: A Connection to the Past and the Earth

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