Genebanks are expected to have what is called a safety duplicate of their collection, preferably in a different geographic location. Producing these safety duplicates requires growing out the samples, harvesting, cleaning and processing the resultant seed and preparing it for long-term cold storage. Unfortunately, this is time-consuming, labor intensive and expensive. Many genebanks simply do not have the resources to do this crucial work. This means that many crop diversity collections around the world are not safety duplicated and their collections could easily be lost.
To address this, the BOLD project of the Crop Trust is providing grants that will deliver technical and financial support to 42 partners around the world to help them regenerate seeds from their key collections and to back them up both at another genebank and send them to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for long-term safekeeping. Those activities are covered under the Work Package 4 of the BOLD project.
The grants focus on crops listed in Annex 1 of the International Treaty for Food and Agriculture, as well as those of national and regional significance. Grantees will regenerate and conserve a wide range of crops, from common staples such as wheat and rice to indigenous vegetables, underutilized crops and crop wild relatives — all of which will help ensure future food security.