Food Forever: Strategic Plan 2030
The Crop Trust's strategic plan 2030 describes how the organization will rise to the complex and interconnected challenges that our agrifood system faces. Food Forever sets the organization's course for the next seven years with the goal to permanently secure key collections of crop diversity in a viable global system of genebanks and help make this diversity more readily available for use. We want to use innovative approaches to increase the Crop Trust’s financial ability to support the system, within an environmental, social and governance framework that is robust and transparent.
Interconnected Challenges
The world is facing a multitude of serious, interconnected challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty and inequality, food and nutritional insecurity, as well as increasing conflict and injustice.
It is vital that we solve these problems—and urgently.
Amid all the urgency, complexity and uncertainty, there is one thing we can do that stands out: we must conserve crop diversity. Crop diversity is the foundation of sustainable, resilient and healthy agri-food systems.
The more crop diversity is safely conserved and available to researchers and farmers, the more options we have at our disposal to respond to an uncertain future.
Marise Borja, one of the BOLD genebank reviewers, examines the INIAP long-term storage cold room. She is accompanied by Alvaro Monteros, the Delegate Manager at the National Department of Plant Genetic Resources in Ecuador. Photo: Crop Trust/Luis Salazar
Why the Crop Trust? Our Purpose and Rationale
The Crop Trust has spent almost 20 years helping build a global system that ensures the long-term conservation of crop diversity. Working with national and international genebanks, the Crop Trust has stimulated collaboration and priority-setting, assisted in expanding and safety-duplicating collections of crop diversity, fostered improvements and efficiencies in their management, and supported the adoption of high standards and new technologies.
But the global system is not yet fully functional, nor sustainable. Many genebanks still face capacity challenges, placing important crop diversity at risk, and limiting its use. Much diversity is also missing from genebanks. Climate change, natural disasters and geopolitical conflict are threatening crop diversity, both in the field and in genebanks. And once it is lost, crop diversity is gone forever, unable to support future food needs.
Toward a Global Genebank Partnership
All crop diversity that is unique and important for food and nutrition security globally is not yet safely conserved and available.
To make it happen, it will be necessary to continue supporting individual genebanks, but this will not be sufficient. Genebanks need to work together more—they must truly become a system. There must be more technical collaboration and knowledge sharing among them, more mutual learning and capacity development, better communications with all stakeholders, and stronger bridges to users. This will lead to higher overall efficiency and effectiveness, and more impact for the system as a whole. Over the coming years, the Crop Trust will focus more on how genebanks work together and with their users. They will be encouraged to look outwards—we call this moving toward a truly Global Genebank Partnership.
