Press Releases

CUSCO, PERU (15 February 2011)—As climate change and disease threaten potato farming in the tuber’s ancestral home in the Peruvian Andes, potato preservationists today launched a major effort to safeguard more than 1,500 varieties...

ROME (10 December 2010)—The Global Crop Diversity Trust today announced a major global search to systematically find, gather, catalogue, use, and save the wild relatives of wheat, rice, beans, potato, barley, lentils, chickpea,...

SYDNEY (22 October 2010)—Hoping to save the vulnerable varieties of bananas painted by the artist Paul Gauguin, rare coconuts, and 1,000 other unique varieties of staple fruit and vegetable crops across the Pacific, crop...

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA (21 September 2010)—A global social media campaign to save Europe’s most important collection of fruits and berries has collected over 50,000 petition signatures worldwide. The campaign is part of a massive...

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA (9 September 2010)—Momentum behind a global effort to save Europe’s most important collection of fruits and berries reached a new level this week, as the Russian Housing Development Foundation (RZhS)...

BENIN (8 September 2010)—Farmers and crop scientists worldwide are engaged in an ambitious new effort to add 3,000 yam samples to international genebanks with the aim of saving the diversity of a crop that is consumed by 60...

LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (11 July 2010)—A new collection of some of North America’s hottest foods—an eclectic range of New World chili peppers—were delivered to the cool Arctic Circle environs of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this...

LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (11 March 2010)—Days after celebrating its second anniversary, the Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault is receiving this week thousands of new seeds that will push its collection to more than half a million...

ROME, ITALY (18 November 2009)—Alarmed by a substantial oversight in the global climate talks leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month, more than 60 of the world’s most prominent...

ROME, ITALY (June 4, 2009) - The Global Crop Diversity Trust recently entered into a grant agreement with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) to provide USD 50,000 annually, in perpetuity, towards the long-term...

ROME, ITALY (22 May 2009)—The Global Crop Diversity Trust announced today numerous new grant awards to support scientists to explore the millions of seed samples maintained in 1,500 crop genebanks around the world. They will...

LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (26 February 2009)—Four tons of seeds - almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species - from food crop collections maintained by Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural...