Funding proposal | Canadian contribution to plant sample preservation project is under review
A consortium of international agencies has announced a $109 million five-year fund to sustain the massive collection of plant samples preserved in gene banks around the world.
More than 700,000 plant samples are preserved at 11 CGIAR Consortium storage sites, including a wheat variety gene collection in Saskatoon.
The project’s goal is to make genetics available to plant researchers or farmers trying to create new or hardier varieties as climate and weather conditions change or new diseases appear.
However, after a decade of support for the project, Canada has yet to decide if it will continue funding.
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“The proposal is currently under review and therefore we cannot comment,” said an email message from the Canadian International Development Agency Jan. 31.
Last week, Global Crop Diversity Trust executive director Aslaug Marie Haga from Norway was in Ottawa thanking the Canadian government for a decade of support and asking for future contributions.
“I am here to thank Canada because Canadian money pledged in 2003 has been very instrumental for this organization,” she said. “I also am here to discuss future funding.”
She left without a commitment but said she was hopeful.
In 2003, the Canadian government made a 10-year pledge of $1 million annually to the trust to help rescue plant varieties and genomics in danger of being lost as world agriculture increasingly depends on a shrinking pool of genomic traits to create high-yielding varieties.
Haga said Canadian funding was instrumental in a project to collect 90,000 crop variety samples during the past decade for storage in gene banks run by the CGIAR Research Program for Managing and Sustaining Crop Collections.
“It is the biggest rescue program ever,” she said.
“It went a long way (to preserving most of the world’s plant gene pool).”
Haga said a number of countries are funding the $109 million five-year commitment with an eye on future crop variety challenges.
“One of the most important tasks is preparing for climate change and making sure that with temperatures warming, we are creating crops that are tolerant to drought,” she said.
The likelihood of increasing pest problems and the need for crops that can adapt to sometimes-excessive moisture also are looming problems.
She said thousands of varieties now being grown by farmers around the world can trace their creation to genetic material stored in CGIAR gene banks.
After a tsunami flooded millions of acres of Asian farmland with saline ocean water in 2004, the International Rice Research Institute in Manila combed through more than 100,000 rice samples and found varieties that are more salt-resistant, allowing production to resume.
The Norwegian government has worked with the trust to create a back-up duplicate seed bank on a remote island near the Arctic Circle.
