- Kurdistan inaugurates a new genebank in Sulaymaniyah, which Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani calls one of Kurdistan and Iraq’s most important national projects.
- Ghana complements its national collection at Bunso. The new facility further north will improve drying, processing and conservation, while giving northern farmers and breeders closer access to crop diversity.
- Three decades of African bean research partnerships and networking have helped turn a staple crop into a vehicle for improved nutrition, livelihoods and climate resilience.
- In the Philippines, eight promising purple-yam accessions combine yield, sensory quality and market appeal, with Villasis 2 producing up to 60 tonnes per hectare in trials. Does it need a network next?
- However, executive director of Seed Savers Exchange Mike Bollinger’s call in Food Tank’s to carry seed diversity forward extends stewardship beyond formal institutions: Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners and seed libraries all have a role in keeping crop diversity alive and used.
Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank
- Blue mangoes.
- Kampot pepper.
- Antarctic flowering plant.
- Sapelo Island red pea.
- Navajo seed data.
Biodiversity plans need genebanks
A new FAO policy brief analyses how the 78 revised National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) submitted to the CBD as of February 2026 treat agrifood systems.
The headline numbers: All 78 NBSAPs that were looked at include agrifood-related targets and actions: 63% of all national targets are implemented through agrifood-related actions, and 36% of all planned actions (4,381 of 12,332) relate to agrifood systems. I think that’s pretty good. Togo tops the list with 80% of its actions being agrifood-related, built around agroecology, sustainable forest management and genetic resource use.
The genetic resources for food and agriculture (GRFA) angle: Of the 55-item typology of agrifood actions tracked, sustainable use of GRFA appears in 74% of NBSAPs and conservation of GRFA in 70%, so both are relatively well covered. But two other pieces of the puzzle lag: inventory and characterization of GRFA sits at only 49%, and access and benefit-sharing of GRFA at 48%. So countries seem to be readier to commit to using and conserving genetic resources than to the maybe less glamorous work of cataloguing what they have or sorting out benefit-sharing arrangements.
The report’s six policy recommendations essentially argue for turning these paper commitments into funded, monitored action, particularly flagging aquaculture, agroecology, rights-based governance, and finance as areas needing a bit of a push.
This is a genuinely thorough policy analysis: 78 NBSAPs coded against a 55-item action typology is real work. But to me it was a little frustrating that twelve pages on agrifood systems never get to grips with the infrastructure that actually keeps agricultural biodiversity — the foundation of healthy agrifood system — alive. Protected areas are mentioned, but there’s nothing specifically on national or international genebanks or on-farm conservation; no Plant Treaty and its access and benefit-sharing system either. I can’t believe none of these were mentioned in the NBSAPs. Conservation and sustainable use of GRFA end up as generic line items in a typology, without much sense of what “conservation” looks like in practice, or who’s actually doing the inventorying that only half of countries have committed to.
It’s solid policy-text analysis, but it stays resolutely, almost defiantly, high-level. It’s a report on commitments on biodiversity in and for agriculture that doesn’t recognize that at least for crop diversity, a global genebank system is being built to help carry them out. Seems a pity.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.
50 years of cassava diversity: what went into the bank, and what came out
Two new papers in Plants, published two months apart, tell the story of CIAT’s cassava genebank 1 from opposite ends: how the collection was assembled and conserved, and what breeders have actually done with it. Read together, they amount to a remarkably candid 50-year audit of a slow-motion agricultural asset. I’ll just give you the main beats here. It’s really worth reading both papers in full.
Part I is the origin story. Botanist Victor Manuel Patiño’s 1969–70 expeditions alone brought in roughly a third of today’s 5,000 or so cassava landraces, transported as stem cuttings across Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and beyond, often in difficult conditions and under changing quarantine rules.
The collection has its blind spots: Brazil and the Guianas remain poorly represented 2, passport information can be patchy, and the overwhelmingly male composition of historical collecting teams probably meant that some of the varietal knowledge held by women farmers went unrecorded.
Conservation itself has been a moving target. It has evolved from field genebanks to in vitro slow-growth tissue culture storage after a frogskin-disease scare forced the field collection to close in 2003, and now cryopreservation at CIAT’s Future Seeds facility. Meanwhile, DNA fingerprinting keeps revealing an awkward truth familiar to genebank curators everywhere: the names people give varieties and the genetic identities of the material do not always agree. A lot of effort over the years has also gone into testing for pathogens to ensure that distribution is safe.
Part II asks what all this diversity is actually for? The answer has also changed considerably over five decades. Early researchers chased traits such as high protein and low cyanogenic content before turning towards yield and starch percentage in the Green Revolution era.
The payoffs have been considerable: landraces have contributed traits such as resistance to pests and diseases, adaptation to acid soils and highland cold, and quality traits for fresh-market cooking versus industrial starch. The route from accession to released variety is rarely direct: a landrace gets screened for a trait, crossed, then recombined and selected over several more generations before anything reaches a farmer’s field. The results include varieties like Nataima-3, bred for whitefly resistance thanks to an Ecuadorian landrace. At the same time, the authors argue that cassava breeding now needs to move beyond broad phenotypic selection towards more systematic use of inbred lines, because the crop’s high heterozygosity makes the introduction of specific traits particularly difficult.
The two papers therefore tell a big story about genebanks. Collecting diversity is only the beginning; its value is realized decades later, when a breeder encounters a problem that nobody could have anticipated when the stuff was first collected. The cassava collection is a long-term portfolio of biological options, one whose contents have taken half a century to assemble, whose inventory is still being corrected, and whose most valuable assets may be the ones that have not yet been used.
A new project is looking to genetically engineer cassava to photosynthesize more efficiently at higher temperatures. I do wonder whether someone has already checked whether any of those 5,000 landraces might help with that. Maybe they can’t, but it’s worth having a look. And you never know, something else of interest might jump out. That’s the beauty of large international collections of crop diversity such as CIAT’s.