Biodiversity Preserved: in situ and ex situ; CGIAR

In situ conservation can be in a farmer's field, in rangelands and and in national parks or other types of nature preserve. Most plant genetic resources of importance for food and agriculture are located outside "protected areas" such as parks. Frequently they are not just conserved but are also used as sources of food and income.

In many countries farmers practice de facto conservation of genetic diversity by maintaining traditional landraces (varieties developed locally). Farmers select seeds for various characteristics, breed plants and save seed for replanting. Such practices go beyond pure conservation by improving and developing plant genetic resources. Often the farmers have no real choice but to develop and save their own landraces. Over one billion people live in farm families, where the responsibility for management and improvement of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture currently resides with the family itself.

There are programs to help these farmers with management, conservation and improvement of their plant genetic resources. Some examples from the Report on the State of the World of Plant Genetic Resources:

• In Ethiopia, landraces of the most important food crops including teff, barley, chick pea, sorghum and faba bean are maintained on farm through a program of the country's Biodiversity Institute in cooperation with the African Seeds of Survival Program;
• In Sierra Leone, a project for the on-farm conservation of rice and other crops has been initiated at the Rokpur Rice Research Institute, in the context of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Program.

See On-Farm Management of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: paragraphs 46-54 of the Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources, available under "More Reading".

Ex situ preservation:

Concern that modern varieties and agricultural practices were wiping out much biodiversity in the field led, in the 1970s, to a rush to create genebanks to preserve germplasm ex situ. Experts believed, with good reason, that they had very little time in which to collect and safeguard these resources from extinction in the field.

In the early 1970s there were fewer than 10 genebanks with perhaps no more than half a million accessions (samples). A total of 1,308 genebanks are now recorded in the World Information and Early Warning System database. and it is believed there are now 6.1 million accessions stored worldwide in ex situ germplasm collections (although many may be duplicates).

Forty per cent of all accessions in genebanks are cereals, and 15 per cent are food legumes. Vegetables, roots and tubers, fruits and forages each account for less than 10 per cent of global collections. Medicinal, spice, aromatic and ornamental species are rarely found in long-term public collections. Aquatic plants of relevance for food and agriculture are likewise not found in such collections.

The key problems with existing ex situ storage are:

• deteriorating facilities, often built in developing countries by donor countries which did not make long-term commitments to the facilities' upkeep;
• lack of surveys, inventories and taxonomic studies, as well as lack of evaluation of the material in the genebanks. Such knowledge is necessary to identify gaps in collections and so that breeders know where to find certain genetic qualities they are seeking for plant breeding purposes.

Even under optimal ex situ storage conditions, seed viability will decline, necessitating regeneration in order to replenish seed stocks. FAO estimates that as many as one million accessions may now be in need of replanting in order to generate new seeds for storage. Regeneration itself is fraught with difficulties and can promote genetic erosion (see Breese, E.L., 1989. Regeneration and Multiplication of Germplasm Resources in Seed Genebanks: The Scientific Background. Rome. IBPGR.)

More on Ex-Situ Conservation in the Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources, paragraphs 55-86, available under "More Reading".

The CGIAR Collections

A treasure trove of genetic possibilities for new crop varieties, medicines and other products lies in the collections of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a global network of international agricultural research centres. Future world food supplies will heavily depend on the CGIAR collections, the world's most important in terms of food and forage species. Precious yet humble are the seeds, cuttings and shoots collected from farm plots, rice paddies, forests and the wild and stored by the CGIAR.

The debate over patenting of life forms led to concern about the legal status of those collections, built as they were on untold tens of thousands of donations by long-forgotten farmers.

In 1994, the member countries of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture reached an agreement putting the CGIAR collections legally "in trust" of the CGIAR research institutes, under the auspices of FAO. They remain in the public domain, a hedge against the vulnerability of "Green Revolution" varieties which are high-yielding but too often built on a narrow genetic base.

At least implicitly, the FAO-CGIAR agreements guarantee farmers access to the genetic resources in the CGIAR collections. When it comes to genetically modified seeds built from CGIAR specimens, however, it is unclear who will share the benefits.

List of CGIAR Centres

CIAT - Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, Cali, Colombia. Founded in 1967 to focus on crop improvement in Latin American lowland tropical agriculture. Research covers rice, beans, cassava, forages and pasture.

CIFOR - Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia. Founded 1992 to focus on research on forest conservation and sustainable development.

CIMMYT - Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, Mexico D.F., Mexico. Founded 1966. Focus on crop improvement in maize, wheat, barley and triticale.

CIP - Centro Internacional de la Papa, Lima, Peru. Founded 1971. Focus on potato and sweet potato improvement with special attention to the ecology of specific mountain regions.

IPGRI - International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome. Founded 1974. Conservation of gene pools for crops and forages.

ICARDA - International Center for Agricultural Researach in the Dry Areas. Aleppo, Syria. Founded 1977. Focus on improving farming systems for North Africa and West Asia. Research covers wheat, barley, chickpea, lentils, pasture legumes and small ruminants.

ICLARM - International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management, Makati, Metro Manila, the Philippines. Founded 1977. Research on all aspects of fisheries to improve efficiency and productivity of culture and capture fisheries.

ICRAF - International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, Nairobi, Kenya. Founded 1977. Focus on initiating and supporting research on integrating trees in land-use systems in developing countries.

ICRISAT - International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India. Founded 1972. Focus on crop improvement, cropping systems in sorghum, millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut.

IFPRI - International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, USA. Founded 1975. Focus on food policy and socio-economic research related to agricultural development, and institution-building in developing countries.

IIMI - International Irrigation Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Founded 1984. Focus on performance of irrigation in developing countries.

IITA - International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. Founded 1967. Focus on crop improvement and land management in humid and sub-humid tropics, farming systems in maize, cassava, cowpea, plantain, soybean, rice and yam.

ILRI - International Livestock Research Institute, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Nairobi, Kenya. Founded 1994. Research to improve livestock productivity and animal health, with responsibility for CGIAR system-wide livestock research program.

IRRI - International Rice Research Institute, Manila, The Philippines. Founded 1960. Research on global rice improvement.

ISNAR - International Service for National Agricultural Research, The Hague, Netherlands. Focus on strengthening and developing national agricultural research systems.

WARDA - West Africa Rice Development Association, Bouake, Côte d'Ivoire. Founded 1970. Focus on rice improvement in West Africa, with research on rice in mangrove and inland swamps, upland conditions, irrigated conditions.

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