Seeds for Resilience, a project of Crop Trust, is working to strengthen gene banks across sub-Saharan Africa. The project provides financial and technical support to the national gene banks of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia.
According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the climate crisis and land degradation create unprecedented challenges for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. As these challenges intensify, it becomes increasingly difficult for crops to flourish. Gene banks are crucial in preserving crop diversity in these uncertain times.
“Our aim is to try and safeguard as much diversity as possible,” Matthew Heaton, Project Manager of Seeds for Resilience, tells Food Tank. He explains that Seeds for Resilience focuses on supporting national gene banks—rather than large, international ones—because they can safeguard regionally and culturally important seeds.
National gene banks are often “more focused on local varietal diversity of particularly important crops for local needs,” Heaton tells Food Tank. “They are quite powerful in these unique sorts of collections they have.”
Another goal of the Seeds for Resilience project is supporting gene bank infrastructure. They assist in upgrading equipment, increasing staff capacity, and ensuring that seed collections are backed up, documented, and meet international standards. “We work with our partners to try and work out how we can best support upgrades of infrastructure in a way that’s really sustainable, to ensure long-term conservation and use of their collection,” Heaton tells Food Tank.
Daniel Ashie Kotey, Acting Director at the CSIR-Plant Genetic Resources Research Institute of Ghana (CSIR-PGRRI), collaborates with Seeds for Resilience to make improvements to CSIR-PGRRI’s genebank. Kotey explains that the support Seeds for Resilience provided has already helped CSIR-PGRRI increase capacity, adopt standard operating procedures, and expand engagement with farmers.
“We engage directly with the farmers themselves so they themselves can select materials that benefit them and allow them to fight the effects of climate change and other conditions,” Kotey tells Food Tank.
According to Heaton, Seeds for Resilience is cultivating farmer engagement across all five of their partner gene banks. “We have this amazing situation where farmers are now able to not only access more varieties and use them towards their own aims, but they’re also able to [give] feedback,” he tells Food Tank. “That makes this nice two-way exchange of knowledge, and we can use that for more research to make better products.”
In addition to making a variety of commercial crops accessible, Seeds for Resilience focuses on making indigenous crops available to farmers. Heaton tells Food Tank that indigenous crops are often very nutritious, adaptable, and resilient to the effects of a changing climate. Seeds for Resilience can “support genebanks t0 share these culturally-important, nutritious crops and bring them to farmers in a way that empowers farmers’ choices,” Heaton says.
Seeds for Resilience is ensuring that the national gene banks of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zambia have the resources and capacity necessary to become world-class operations. “The vision is that once we are able to build capacity with our facilities, we can become a learning center for other West African countries,” Kotey tells Food Tank. “Because genetic resource conservation is a shared responsibility and a global resource that we hold for all humanity, now and forever.”
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Photo courtesy of Neil Palmer, Crop Trust
