Scientists have agreed on a $109 million plan to strengthen the world’s biggest seed banks of crops such as rice and wheat to help protect and develop new varieties resistant to climate change and other threats.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust and the CGIAR Consortium of agricultural researchers said on Thursday that a five-year plan would help secure storage of more than 700,000 samples of crops at 11 existing gene banks from the Philippines to Belgium.
“This will drive the creation of a real global system” to help safeguard food crops, Cary Fowler, outgoing head of the Bonn-based Trust, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Click here to read the full story.
