Twenty years ago this month, the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog was born. Typically, the first thing we wrote about was a genebank in crisis.
In October 2006, Typhoon Xangsane — known locally as Milenyo — tore through the Philippines. It damaged the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory, with mud everywhere. The genebank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), just down the road, luckily came through largely unscathed, and IRRI offered its facilities to help the Philippine national system recover.
Reading that little post twenty years later is pretty sobering. The underlying problem hasn’t gone away. Genebanks may be grandily described as custodians of crop diversity, but they are also buildings — dependent on staff, electricity, equipment, roads and functioning institutions. A typhoon or prolonged power outage can turn a well-run collection into one that’s in trouble almost overnight.
But it’s not all bad news. Something has changed. I think the crop diversity conservation community now thinks much more explicitly about risk and recovery. Safety duplication, backup equipment and disaster preparedness are a much bigger part of the way we plan long-term conservation. The growth of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the fact that safety-duplication arrangements are embedded in standard operating procedures and performance metrics reflect a recognition that no genebank, however well managed, can be assumed to be permanently secure.
The Philippines story also points to something else that has become increasingly clear over the past two decades: genebank resilience is a property of a network, not just an individual institution. IRRI was able to help because it was nearby, unaffected and connected to the national system. But mutual support on that scale only works when institutions have relationships, systems for sharing material and experience and, crucially, reserves of goodwill and trust.
Since that first year, we’ve written about a daunting range of threats to agricultural biodiversity — droughts, floods, wars, political upheavals, budget cuts, pests, diseases, climate change and, inevitably, the occasional freezer failure. We’ve also written about the success stories though — the people and institutions rescuing and nurturing crop diversity, often with limited resources, putting it to work, and making the case for its importance.
A lot has changed since 2006. The technologies are fancier. The vocabulary is different. We have vastly more data, better tools and a deeper understanding of crop diversity and the systems needed to conserve it.
But some of the fundamental challenges remain stubbornly familiar.
Perhaps that’s one of the unexpected pleasures of an archive such as this blog provides. It is of course a record of what we thought was important at the time. But it is also a way of discovering that some of the problems we think are new today have been sitting there, quietly and not so quietly, for a while.
The blog has changed too, of course. In the early days, we were largely pointing to interesting things we had found. Over time, that has gradually turned into something maybe a tad more analytical. We now spend more time connecting the dots between different kinds of diversity, questioning claims that don’t quite stand up, and asking what new research actually means, especially for farmers.
So, as we celebrate twenty years of the evolution of the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, let’s remember that there is still much to discover — and quite a lot to rediscover. Do delve into our archive. You never know: the answer to a question you are asking today may already be there, in a discussion we had last week, or 20 years ago.
And if it’s not, we hope you at least have as much fun looking for it as we had writing about it.