One of the reasons I haven’t been very active on here for the past couple of weeks is that I’ve been busy at work with a little thing called the Chatham House Dialogue on “Crop Diversity for Challenging Times: the Role of Genebanks in Sustainable Development.”
The Chatham House Dialogue comprised three separate sessions that aimed to build a vision of how genebanks can play a fuller and more effective role in helping agriculture meet future challenges. Special attention was paid to the evolving role of the international genebanks managed by the CGIAR. The key findings and recommendations of the dialogue were written up as a brief statement and, together with background documents prepared for the Dialogue, were used as the basis for a System level review of CGIAR genebank costs and operations (GCO review).
It’s all described on the website of the CGIAR Genebank Platform. There you’ll find the background papers, presentations, a brief personal summary by your truly, and videos of some of the participants.
The bottom line?
In these circumstances, indeed, conserving crop diversity is the ultimate option to ensure “no regrets.” If it is useful in good times, it is absolutely essential under TUNA ((That is, characterized by turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity.)) conditions. The participants could not envisage any future scenario, at whatever scale, in whatever part of the world, in which agriculture’s need for crop diversity—whether intra- or inter-specific—was likely to decrease. There will be changes in the nature of the demand, for sure, but not an absolute decrease. Countries, institutes and people are in fact likely to become ever more interdependent for crop diversity, and not only because of climate change, but also because of changes in pests and diseases, in consumer demand, and in trade, to name just a few major drivers. Interdependence requires shared governance and trust, which led to a plea from one participant that researchers become more politically active.
While this is welcome as it stands, I would have liked to see sections on the role of information systems and novel approaches to prebreeding. Both have a key role in establishing the connectivity of Genebank collections to breeding programs which turn is of crucial importance in justifying continued or indeed increased investment in germplasm collections.