Humankind has come to rely on just a handful of staple crops for its survival, namely wheat, rice, maize, potato and, more recently, soybean, sunflower oil and palm oil (see 2014 study).

Besides the health risks associated with excessively uniform diets, food systems relying upon just a few crops are particularly vulnerable to major threats like drought, insect pests, and diseases, all expected to worsen with climate change.

But these few crops that the world consumes today come from a huge diversity of wild plants and crop varieties that have evolved over thousands of years and were crossbred by nature, farmers, and scientists.

Conserving and sharing this diversity is one of the fundamentals of sustainable food futures.

Following CIAT’s groundbreaking work on the globalization of diets, in 2014 the same team of scientists turned their attention to where the plants we eat come from.

They wanted to find out how much different regions of the world depend on others in a very specific sense.

The argument goes like this: cassava originated in South America, therefore Africa – where so much cassava is produced and consumed – needs South America. Why? Because South America has a much bigger range of cassava diversity than Africa. This includes plants that might be distant cassava relatives that endure in the wild, or the many varieties in genebanks or farmers’ fields that simply never made it to Africa. If a disease breaks out in African cassava fields, the varieties in South America might contain traits that crop breeders can use to make Africa’s cassava more resilient.

But South America also needs South and Southeast Asia, where sugarcane comes from; Southeast Asia needs West and Central Africa for oil palm, and so on. Now enter climate change: rising temperatures could mean North America needs to track down heat-tolerant rice varieties from Asia; East Asia will need South America for more resilient peanuts, and if anything happens to coffee, the whole world is going to need Africa.

The team found that, on average, of all the plants providing calories, fat, and proteins in our diets, over two-thirds originate beyond the national borders within which they are consumed. In short, we all depend on each others’ plants.

But there’s a catch. Lots of those plants aren’t conserved, while others are conserved but not shared. The key to pest-resistant cassava or drought-tolerant beans could be out there in the plants’ wild relatives, uncollected. Or the plants could be locked away in a genebank somewhere for no-one to use. For scientists like Colin, that means we’re vulnerable: our food supply has a genetic safety net that is a mere fraction of all the diversity out there. It’s too few eggs in not enough baskets. That led the team to two simple, if far-reaching conclusions.

First, we should conserve all plants related to our food supply. That means getting as many different samples of domesticated crops – plus their wild and weedy brethren – into the world’s genebanks as quickly as possible. Cities are going up; trees are coming down; habitats are being turned into car parks. Tomorrow, some of those plants might be lost forever; many have already disappeared.

Second, those collections should be shared with whoever needs them.

“The genetic diversity of crops should be considered public goods,” says Colin. “That means no-one owns them, but everyone can benefit from them.”

A transparent, free and open system for sharing these collections means the plants can be more easily used in crop-breeding programs around the world, to toughen up popular varieties. CIAT’s genebank is already part of this system, conserving collections of cassava, beans and tropical forages, with a global mandate to make them freely available.

Colin, together with scientists from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and others, took the research to a meeting of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) in Rome in October 2015. They hope the work will influence the scope of the treaty, which sets the guidelines for the global sharing of plant genetic resources.

Few people have heard of plant genebanks or are aware of the role they play for agriculture and food production.

Genebanks are places where biological material is collected, stored, catalogued and made available for redistribution. Genebanks are not just biodiversity repositories. They provide direct help to farmers and national breeding programs.

CGIAR has a partnership with the Global Crop Diversity Trust to conserve the diversity of plant genetic resources in collections held by 11 CGIAR members, including CIAT, and to make this diversity available to breeders under the framework of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

For one – and only one – of the 169 targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2030 is not nearly soon enough.

The future of CIAT’s genebank: Future Seeds

A global hub for crop diversity

CIAT has also embarked on an ambitious initiative called Future Seeds to upgrade its genebank to better store and distribute key crop collections in trust for humanity: beans, cassava, and tropical forages.

Beyond this, the state-of-the-art environmentally sustainable facility will also generate and make available vast amounts of invaluable information that can help unlock the secret power of seeds. In addition, it will serve as a hotbed for innovative training and outreach.

By investing in the global system today we can have enough food for tomorrow

CIAT continues reaching out to governments, foundations, the private sector, and individuals to establish a global genebank and knowledge hub for agrobiodiversity.