Category: Genebanks

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The bit in between

We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what happens between those places.

A new IIED report, Nature Nurture: How to keep agrobiodiverse forest and farm systems alive in the modern world, looks at local collective community organisations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania and how they support on-farm conservation and use of crop diversity. In Tanzania, community seed banks lend seed to farmers, who return it after harvest; seed exchanges have brought previously little known local varieties into the banks. In the Philippines, a demonstration farm maintains traditional sweetpotato varieties for distribution. In Indonesia, producer groups run nurseries while much seed management remains in farmers’ hands.

Farmer-run seed banks, demonstration farms and nurseries give communities ways to organise for themselves the conservation and use of crop diversity. That’s great. But what if something goes wrong? A crop disappears from a village. A variety falls out of use in a district. A community seed bank loses its stock. And what if a variety being maintained in one place could be useful somewhere else, perhaps very far away?

This is where the bit in between comes into play.

Nature Nurture has very little to say about how seeds and knowledge move to and fro between farmers and community organisations on one side and formal genebanks on the other. It recognizes their complementarity, but deals with it in a single sentence: “While ex-situ conservation remains an important safeguard against genetic erosion, the farmer-led and Indigenous systems that actively sustain agrobiodiversity within living production landscapes must have greater recognition and investment.” That’s all true, but somehow insufficient.

The report does promise practical guidance for collective organisations in its next phase. How they can connect with national genebanks would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, though, national genebanks should be doing the same. Maybe by re-thinking their information systems, as I suggested a few days ago.

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Nibbles: Historical photos, Belgian pears, Miombo fruits, Kenya seed treble, Nepal landraces, Women

  1. Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture.
  2. Long before photography, or “pre‑breeding” was a buzzword, Belgian pomologist Jean‑Baptiste Van Mons was running massive pear selection trials and gifting us Beurré Bosc and Doyenné Boussock.
  3. As Southern Africa’s miombo woodlands shrinks, scientists are cloning wild trees so the fruit — and food security — outlive the forest. Now for the pre-breeding.
  4. Greenpeace Africa’s Seed Project makes the case for indigenous seeds as a route to farmer independence. And you can help.
  5. And oh so coincidentally, a network of community seed banks in Kenya is rescuing indigenous seeds so the diversity is still around when opportunity (or crisis) knocks.
  6. Also in Kenya, the national genebank’s collectors are racing to secure opportunity crops.
  7. Nepal’s indigenous crops and landraces are at the same time more needed than ever, and under threat. So, much like in Kenya.
  8. The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT says women are at the center of sustainable food systems; the fine print adds: “as they have always been.”
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Restarting a relationship with seeds

Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently.

In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While Rowen White, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, explores the cultural and spiritual meaning of seeds, farming and “fertile resistance” in a conversation with For the Wild. Now, I don’t think that formal genebanks were involved in either case, but together the two pieces raise an intriguing question for them: what happens to the knowledge that travels with a seed when the seed comes home?

White talks about seeds as relatives: carriers of relationships, cultural memory and knowledge. Glassman-Hughes’s story makes the problem more tangible, if less poetic. Metacom corn has returned to Wampanoag land after roughly 350 years, but the people, landscape and farming conditions have changed in the meantime. No complete set of instructions came with the seeds. But even if they had, they probably wouldn’t be much use now. People had to experiment, observe and learn again.

I think that’s an interesting lesson. We tend to think of traditional knowledge as something that can be documented when an accession is collected and then preserved and made use of, much like the seeds themselves. But information that was useful to a farmer even just a generation ago may no longer be relevant in changed circumstances. Some knowledge may have been lost, some may have evolved, and new knowledge emerges when people start growing the crop again.

We’ve talked about this here before. Back in 2010, I wrote about a social media exchange between taro breeders in Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A video posted by breeder John Cho sparked a conversation in which people translated results, identified promising hybrids, compared performance in different countries and even discovered discrepancies in the identity of some material. I asked then whether this kind of open-ended discussion might be more useful for encouraging the use of crop diversity in genebanks than conventional accession-by-descriptor tables.

A week later, I pushed the idea further, asking whether genebank documentation needed a “social networking makeover.” My point wasn’t that we should abandon databases. (Although…) I was trying to put the people using and evaluating germplasm at the centre, allowing their observations, questions and experiences to accumulate around the accession, while still feeding validated information into structured databases.

If knowledge about a seed changes as people grow it, select it, use it and adapt it, then a genebank accession’s record is just a starting point. When material is returned to cultivation, what people learn about it should have a way of flowing back into the conservation system. So it can be used by the next in line.

Rematriation is not just returning seeds, it is restarting a relationship with those seeds. That doesn’t mean every genebank needs a community liaison officer. (Although…) Nor should genebanks romanticise traditional knowledge or assume that a community’s current practices are frozen remnants of the past. It does mean recognising that seeds have a social life, and that the knowledge surrounding them changes too.

The practical challenge is to build conservation systems that can value not only what we know about an accession when we put it away, but what people learn about it when we bring it back. And that, fundamentally, means recognizing that those people should have a stake in the genebank documentation system. That’s far from the case now.

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Joining the dots on food plant diversity

We have access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly changing world, an unusually broad review by Colin Khoury (very much friend of the blog) and colleagues. It has all the latest data, but it also does several other things that make it more than a conventional state-of-the-art paper.

For one, it brings together diversity at several levels that are too often discussed separately: species, varieties and genes, of course, but also the diversity of diets, farming systems, foodways and the knowledge associated with them. It traces the movement of cultivated food plants over the past 12,000 years alongside the much more recent trend towards homogenisation. The result is the weird world we live in today: more kinds of crops available globally, but less difference between what people in different places eat.

Colin and friends also take a hard look at what we don’t know. We have surprisingly little evidence for how much food-plant diversity has actually been lost, how vulnerable today’s production systems are because of increasing uniformity, or what is happening to less visible forms of diversity, such as nutritional and chemical variation. The authors call for better monitoring, including an early-warning system for crop vulnerability. Now where have I heard that before?

And the paper connects the dots between conservation approaches that all too often live in isolation: genebanks, botanic gardens, community seed banks, on-farm initiatives, protected areas, breeding programmes and markets. Genebanks are all well and good, but diversity also needs to keep going in fields, landscapes, cuisines and communities. Again, not particularly new, but it’s good to have it repeated, brought up to date, and placed in the broadest possible context.

A couple of those dots are discussed in more detail in a companion opinion paper, Enhance food plant diversity conservation and use through greater coordination between genebanks and botanic gardens, which asks what might become possible if two of the world’s major plant conservation communities worked a bit more closely together. Which must be possible because they are nicely complementary, so neither should fear the other as a competitor.

The review paper maps the problem. The opinion piece explores a possible route towards a more joined-up conservation system. Which leaves us with its own small paradox: conserving food plant diversity requires flattening some of the differences within a remarkably diverse conservation community. Happy Crop Diversity Day 2026.