News

Harnessing useful traits found in the weedy distant cousins (“wild relatives”) of domesticated crops to develop more climate-resilient varieties is a lengthy and complex process.

Wild relatives of the arid-zone grain sorghum have...

The Crop Trust has signed an agreement with Zambia’s national genebank under the Seeds for Resilience Project to help safeguard the country’s crop diversity and make it more accessible to farmers, breeders and researchers.

The...

Since 2021, the CGIAR Genebank Platform Policy Module has developed and promoted an online course for CGIAR researchers and other CGIAR staff to dive deeply into the evolving international laws and policies that govern the sharing...

The Crop Trust and International Plant Treaty

Cryopreservation is the key to conserving many crops we rely on for our food and agriculture.

While most of the world’s food plants, such as rice, maize and wheat, can be conserved...

Crop diversity is humanity’s lifeline. If we want to ensure our future food security, it must be protected. Genebanks contribute to this vital task by storing seeds under special conditions to ensure that they are available when...

Just like everybody needs somebody to love, every new crop variety needs a farmer.

Developing better seeds that can withstand the effects of climate change is only valuable if farmers show them a little love, and actually want to...

They say you get more flies with honey, but an experiment on alfalfa in Kazakhstan found you also get greater yields with honeybees.

The experiment is part of the Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) Project, a global initiative to adapt...

As part of its Seeds for Resilience Project, the Crop Trust has signed the first of five major agreements with national genebanks in sub-Saharan Africa with the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), which...

An excerpt from our recently published 2020 Annual Report by Executive Director Stefan Schmitz

No aspect of the Crop Trust’s work in 2020 was left untouched by the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The shocks of the past...

Until all too recently, sharing information on genetic resources was a hugely inefficient process that made collaboration, at times, impossible.

The solution has been to create online repositories that offer easy-to-share data...

SEE PRESS RELEASE

A Q&A with Crop Trust Executive Director, Stefan Schmitz

A new project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented in partnership with the Deutsche...

A total of 85 boxes with thousands of seed samples will be deposited this week in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This deposit – the biggest since February 2020 – focused on vegetables, particularly tomatoes.

Despite the ongoing...