BRISBANE: Thousands of food crop varieties on the brink of extinction are set to be rescued, improving the world's food security and combating world hunger, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

The project*, which was set up in 2007 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Australian-based Grains Research and Development Foundation, aims to preserve 100 000 rare varieties of crops like rice, maize, wheat, bananas, potatoes and lentils.

Even though many of these endangered varieties are no longer commonly grown by farmers, preserving their genetic diversity may help breeders to select out new strains that are able to withstand pests, degraded soils, or changes in climate.

"Genetic diversity is the raw material for the improvement of crops, so that they will yield more, and more reliably, in the future," said Luigi Guarino, the Trust's senior science coordinator. "It is also what allows farmers to react to changes in market and environmental conditions."

Breeding these new varieties requires access to a wide range of old ones - the widely-used Sonalika wheat, for example, was bred using seeds from 17 countries.

The Trust was originally launched because there no reliable source of funding available to ensure that seed banks could carry out their work year after year, Guarino said.

If a seed bank ran out of money, or if external pressures like civil war or natural disasters forced the closure of the bank, then all its rare varieties would be lost for good.

Guaranteed availability

Now, the Trust is drawing up agreements with seed banks from 46 countries in Central and South Asia, Central and South America, and Africa, to provide the financial support and technical expertise required to regrow threatened samples unique to each collection.

Once a variety has been regrown, the physical characteristics of the plant are recorded to help breeders know if it will be useful to them, and seeds are harvested and divided in three samples – one for the original seed bank, one for another bank that meets international standards, and one for the master collection at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Agreements have been signed for samples of 53, 000 varieties, Guarino said, and agreements for the remaining 47, 000 varieties should be ready within the next few months.

As part of the agreements that the Trust signs with seed banks, the seeds are made available to a system of access and benefit-sharing that was set up with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, to guarantee that the seeds are available to breeders.

Tony Brown, a plant geneticist at CSIRO in Canberra, Australia, said that the centralizing aspect of the Trust's work was an important step in preserving biodiversity and providing food security.

National seed banks often struggled to survive, he said, because politicians did not appreciate the value of the gene banks' work. "They're not sexy enough," Brown said.

Although the Trust's work would not by itself relieve world hunger, their efforts were an essential cog in the wheel, Brown said.

"The have solved a number of problems, like getting collaborative agreements," he said.

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* Correction: the project and not the Trust was set up in 2007