Author: Luigi Guarino

I was a bit flippant a few days ago about the costs of genebanks. And I felt guilty enough about it, especially after Jeremy’s recent piece at Vaviblog on the value of germplasm collections, to look into it a bit more.

It all started with an article in IITA’s R4D Review which looked at the costs of conserving the cowpea collection there. The bit I had trouble with was this:

Using 2008 as a reference year, US$358,143 and $28,217 was spent annually on the conservation and management of cowpea and wild Vigna. The capital cost took the major share of the costs, followed by quasi-fixed costs for scientific staff, nontechnical labor, and nonlabor supplies and consumables. Each accession cost about $72 for cowpea and only about half of that for wild Vigna.

Now, if you know that there are something like 15,000 cowpeas in IITA’s collection, and multiply that by $72, you can very quickly see that you don’t get $386,000, and you might just start to feel justified in losing confidence in the whole exercise.

So what’s going on? Well, what’s going on, when you look into the numbers, ¹ is that the “per accession cost” of $72 was calculated by adding up the individual per accession costs incurred for a set of about a dozen different genebank activities (from acquisition to information management to distribution), and the numbers of accessions involved in each of these was quite different, ranging from 0 for acquisition to 15,000 for long-term storage. So, for example, 475 accessions were distributed at a per accession cost of $22; 2,360 germination tested at $6 a pop etc. Add up all of these per accession costs, as incurred in 2008, and you get $72, for a total of about $386,000.

So, I’m not sure if that $72 really has much of a meaning, but at least now you know how it was calculated. Which maybe the writer of the original piece should have explained.