News

Recipient of the inaugural Crop Trust Legacy Award David Ellis was once asked how to prepare for a career as a genebank scientist. “There’s no fricking way,” he responded. “You not only have to be well grounded in science but you...

In March 1949, a group of experts started a special kind of coffee plantation on the land of the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) at Turrialba, in the center of Costa Rica. They planted 23...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science 

My mother-in-law, Hilda Gathoni, has been growing tea for most of her 83 years. The same tea. The tea she and her family also drink. It’s about one and a half hectares in the highlands above...

AfricaRice will open its new genebank later this year, in Mbe, Côte d’Ivoire, more than a decade after the center re-located to Benin during a civil war. But first, all its rice had to be sent back to Cote d’Ivoire after being...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science

Whenever a new report on some aspect or other of the food system comes out, the metaphors start flying around. We saw that recently with the EAT-Lancet report on what a healthy diet from a...

Donors, Pacific Community (SPC) scientists and the Crop Trust will meet in Suva, Fiji, at the end of March to discuss ways to raise money for the genebank of SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT).

CePaCT conserves a...

Nearly 5,000 seed samples of crop wild relatives saved in challenging, six-year effort to secure the future of food.

Bonn, Germany and Washington, DC (3 DECEMBER 2019)—As the world grapples with the challenge of sustainably...

A Genebank Platform Impact Fellow looks at the journey of beans from the genebank to farmers’ fields.

Stefania Sellitti may not be able to trace her family history back beyond her great grandfather, but she can trace the...

Mmm coffee. Its aroma rises and lingers in the air. You not only smell it, but see it too, in the swirling steam that sways upward and dissipates into nothingness. It teases you: come on, take a sip.

For coffee lovers everywhere,...

Luigi Guarino | Director of Science 

There’s an outfit called Conservation Optimism. Its mission is as its name suggests: inspiring biodiversity conservation through good news. I really admire their moxie, because optimism is a...

Marie Haga | Marie's Corner

With January already well underway, the Crop Trust communications team challenged me to pick five reasons to be excited about 2019. With so much work to choose from, it was no easy task. But as many of...

Michael Major, Crop Trust

Banner photo: Georgina Smith/CIAT

Genesys, the global online portal to information about plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA) in genebanks, has been significantly enhanced with the...