The four largest national collections in the world are located in the USA, Russia, India and China. The National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) in the USA and the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) in Russia are both in the process of backing-up their collections at Svalbard, while the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in India has signed the SDA, but has not yet started safety duplication. The Institute of Crop Germplasm Resources (ICGR-CAAS) in China is not participating so far. Out of the five other national institutions with more than 100,000 accessions in storage, the national genebank in Japan is not currently a depositor, whereas the national genebanks in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the Republic of Korea have all deposited seeds at Svalbard. The most significant origin country gap is India… However, safety duplication of the Indian collections is expected in the future…
That’s from a recent PLOS paper “Global Ex-Situ Crop Diversity Conservation and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: Assessing the Current Status.” And it’s out of date, because the future is now. Though it may be a small step, it’s a significant step, and the message on the box, from which we take our title, says it all.
Talking about Svalbard, I received this piece by a Food First board member in my inbox recently. I’ve read a lot of similar posts but this one tops them all. To sum it up: ex situ conservation = pure evil; in situ conservation = blissful harmony.
Also, may be you missed this workshop ‘Tailoring the Documentation of Plant Genetic Resources in Europe to the Needs of the User‘, Prague, 20-22 May.
Small step indeed – India deposits 25 accessions of pigeon pea and such a fuss about it. My staff at CIAT duplicated the entire bean collection (20,000+) in both CATIE (an international institute run by IICA) and at Embrapa (see next article). This cost a thousand dollars or so and attracted no press comment whatever. Ditto, I think, for the vastly important CIMMYT and IRRI collection duplicates now in Ft Collins. There is a mass of free surplus storage capacity in genebanks around the world and good diplomatic/political reasons for using it to get over the present bottleneck and partial coverage.
I like Cédric’s comment on in situ. The idea (as with agroecology) is being used to prevent any extraneous input to any agricultural development – notably no GM crops in Vavilov Centres (indeed, no new varieties whatever unless produced by indigenous `plant breeding’).
nice paper, Luigi.