Funds to Safeguard 21 Food Crops
April 27, 2007| |
Funds will be flowing in to save more than 100,000 varieties of 21 food crops, some of which form the staple diet of people living in developing countries. This latest initiative by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the United Nations Foundation is being funded by a US$37.5 million grant from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the government of Norway.
The private-government-international partnership aims to pool genetic information about the crops, as well as store and maintain live seeds and root-vegetable samples. The selected crops include several that cannot be grown from seed, such as cassava, yam and coconut, for which storage is trickier. The project's grant will fund research into how to best conserve these plants. The money will also support a central database holding all known genetic information about the crops. The project will probably reach its climax with the opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in March 2008.
Read the news article at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070416/full/070416-14.html.
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