The Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is an

international International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

with a secretariat in

Bonn, Germany The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr ...

. Its mission is to conserve and make available the world's

crop diversity Crop diversity or crop biodiversity is the variety and variability of crops, plants used in agriculture, including their genetic and phenotypic characteristics. It is a subset of and a specific element of agricultural biodiversity. Over the pas ...

for

food security Food security speaks to the availability of food in a country (or geography) and the ability of individuals within that country (geography) to access, afford, and source adequate foodstuffs. According to the United Nations' Committee on World ...

. Established in 2004, the Crop Trust is the only organization whose sole mission is to safeguard the world’s crop diversity for future food security. Through an

endowment fund A financial endowment is a legal structure for managing, and in many cases indefinitely perpetuating, a pool of financial, real estate, or other investments for a specific purpose according to the will of its founders and donors. Endowments are of ...

for crop diversity, the Crop Trust provides financial support for key international and national genebanks that hold collections of diversity for food crops available under the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). The organization also provides tools and support for the efficient management of genebanks, facilitates coordination between conserving institutions, and organizes final backup of crop seeds in the

Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Svalbard Global Seed Vault ( no, Svalbard globale frøhvelv) is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term stor ...

. Since its establishment, the Crop Trust has raised more than USD 300 million for the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund and supports conservation work in over 80 countries.

Mission

Crop diversity is the biological foundation of agriculture, and is the raw material plant breeders and farmers use to adapt crop varieties to pests and diseases. In the future, this crop diversity will play a central role in helping agriculture adjust to climate change and adapt to water and energy constraints.

History

In 1996, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recognized the need for global coordination for the conservation of the world’s crop diversity. At a conference organized by the FAO, 150 countries launched a Global Plan of Action to coordinate efforts at halting the loss of the world’s agrobiodiversity. The Global Plan of Action formed a major pillar of what would become the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, known as the Plant Treaty. The Plant Treaty brings the diversity of 64 food and forage crops into a multilateral system where the genetic material is protected and accessible to all who needed it. To protect the collections that housed that genetic material, however, a stable system of funding was needed. To partly address this need, the Crop Trust was established in October 2004. Its mission was to help build a global system of ''ex situ'' crop diversity conservation, funded through an endowment for crop diversity. The Plant Treaty recognizes the endowment fund as an essential element of its funding strategy and confirms the autonomy of the Crop Trust as a scientific organization in raising and disbursing funds. Geoff Hawtin was appointed the Interim Executive Director of the new organization, housed at the FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy. The Crop Trust began its work gathering contributions for the endowment fund from various foundations, corporations, and governments that had ratified the Plant Treaty. In 2007, the Crop Trust signed its first long-term grant agreement with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. In 2005,

Cary Fowler Morgan Carrington "Cary" Fowler Jr. (born 1949) is an American agriculturalist and the former executive director of the Crop Trust, currently serving as a senior advisor to the trust. On May 5th, Dr. Fowler joined the U.S. Department of State as ...

was appointed the first permanent Crop Trust Executive Director. Under Fowler’s leadership, the Crop Trust initiated the Global System Project and joined the three-party management agreement for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 as a partnership between the Crop Trust, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of Norway, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen). In 2011, the Crop Trust launched th
Crop Wild Relatives Project
a 10-year project to collect and conserve

crop wild relative A crop wild relative (CWR) is a wild plant closely related to a domesticated plant. It may be a wild ancestor of the domesticated (cultivated) plant or another closely related taxon. Overview The wild relatives of crop plants constitute an i ...

s, a project funded by the Government of Norway. In 2012, the Crop Trust appointed Marie Haga as the new Crop Trust Executive Director. A new target for the Crop Trust endowment fund was set at USD850 million to finance a global system for the conservation of crop diversity, centered around key international, regional and national collections, as well as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. In 2013, the Crop Trust opened its new headquarters in Bonn, Germany, through a hosting agreement with the Government of Germany. Shortly thereafter, the Crop Trust launched the five-year CGIAR Genebank CRP, taking on financial responsibility and oversight for the 11 CGIAR genebanks. In 2017, th
CGIAR Genebank Platform
replaced the Genebank CRP program and th
Food Forever Initiative
was launched to raise awareness of efforts to achieve Target 2.5 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In 2018, the Crop Trust signed the first long-term funding agreement with the IRRI genebank, pledging to fully fund essential operations in perpetuity. The Crop Trust celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2019 and crossed the USD 300 million threshold in the endowment fund. In 2020, Stefan Schmitz was appointed Executive Director. With support from the German government, the Crop Trust launched the Seeds4Resilience Project project in 2020. The project will upgrade five national genebanks in sub-Saharan Africa. In February 2020, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault reached one million accessions of seed samples for more than 6,000 species.

Management

The Crop Trust is headquartered in Bonn, Germany, after relocating there from

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

. The executive board is chaired by Catherine Bertini. The Crop Trust's Donors' Council is chaired by Dr. Taek-Ryoun Kwon of South Korea. Main donors include: Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, the

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was ...

, and the

Grains Research and Development Corporation A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legu ...

(Australia). A number of developing countries have also provided support, including Egypt, Ethiopia and India. Further contributions have been received from private corporations, foundations, industry associations, and from private individuals.

Leadership

Executive Director

2004-2005 – Geoff Hawtin (Interim) 2005-2012 –

2013-2019 – Marie Haga 2020–present – Stefan Schmitz

Executive Board Chair

2007–2012 –

Margaret Catley-Carlson Margaret Catley-Carlson, (born 6 October 1942) is a Canadian civil servant. She was Chair and is now a Patron of the Global Water Partnership, a working partnership among all those involved in water management formed in 1996 by the World Bank, th ...

2013–2017 – Walter Fust 2018–2019 – Amb. Timothy Fischer 2019–2021 – Sir Peter Crane 2022–present – Catherine Bertini

Grants

Since its establishment, the Crop Trust has funded work in over 80 countries, and made its first grant for long-term conservation of a collection in late 2006. By 2011, the Crop Trust had established in-perpetuity support (i.e. grants funded through the Crop Trust's endowment) for collections of 15 crops:

rice Rice is the seed of the grass species '' Oryza sativa'' (Asian rice) or less commonly ''Oryza glaberrima'' (African rice). The name wild rice is usually used for species of the genera '' Zizania'' and '' Porteresia'', both wild and domesticat ...

cassava ''Manihot esculenta'', commonly called cassava (), manioc, or yuca (among numerous regional names), is a woody shrub of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, native to South America. Although a perennial plant, cassava is extensively cultivated ...

wheat Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...

barley Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley p ...

faba bean ''Vicia faba'', commonly known as the broad bean, fava bean, or faba bean, is a species of vetch, a flowering plant in the pea and bean family Fabaceae. It is widely cultivated as a crop for human consumption, and also as a cover crop. Varieti ...

, pearl millet,

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. The ...

forages Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavi ...

, banana,

aroids The Araceae are a family of monocotyledonous flowering plants in which flowers are borne on a type of inflorescence called a spadix. The spadix is usually accompanied by, and sometimes partially enclosed in, a spathe (or leaf-like bract). Also k ...

, grass pea, sorghum, yam and

lentil The lentil (''Lens culinaris'' or ''Lens esculenta'') is an edible legume. It is an annual plant known for its lens-shaped seeds. It is about tall, and the seeds grow in pods, usually with two seeds in each. As a food crop, the largest pro ...

. In 2007, the Crop Trust began a global initiative to rescue threatened, high-priority collections of crop diversity in developing countries and to support information systems to improve their conservation and availability. These efforts included providing support to developing countries and international agricultural research centers to deposit shipments of seed samples in the

for safety duplication purposes. In 2010, the Crop Trust launched a global 10-year program to find, gather, catalog and save the wild relatives of 22 major food crops. These wild species contain untapped diversity to help address future challenges to agriculture.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Crop Trust joined the Government of Norway and the Nordic Gene Bank in the 2008 establishment of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a "

fail-safe In engineering, a fail-safe is a design feature or practice that in the event of a specific type of failure, inherently responds in a way that will cause minimal or no harm to other equipment, to the environment or to people. Unlike inherent safe ...

" facility located at Svalbard, Norway. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage of duplicates of seeds conserved in genebanks around the world. This provides security of the world’s food supply against the loss of seeds in genebanks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, and natural disasters. It is designed to hold the seeds of some 4.5 million samples of different varieties of agricultural crops. Primarily through the endowment fund, the Crop Trust provides most of the annual operating costs for the facility. With support from donors, the Crop Trust also assists selected genebanks in packaging and shipping seeds to the Seed Vault.

References

External links

Crop Trust website

Vimeo.com: "Securing Our Food Forever"
— ''Crop Trust video''. {{Authority control Agricultural organisations based in Germany Biodiversity Seed associations Sustainable agriculture International charities Non-profit organisations based in North Rhine-Westphalia