Diversity Seek -- Crop diversity for food security

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Diversity Seek (DivSeek) A global initiative to harness crop diversity for food security and climate adaptation

Transcript of Diversity Seek -- Crop diversity for food security

Page 1: Diversity Seek -- Crop diversity for food security

Diversity Seek (DivSeek)A global initiative

to harness crop diversity

for food security and climate adaptation

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• Declining rate of yield increase

• Declining food reserves

• Growing populations

• More demanding populations

need +60% cereals by 2050

• Climate change

The challenge

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The solutions

• Increase resource use– Expand land– Inputs (water, fertilizers)

• Decrease waste

• Refine agronomicpractices

• Accelerate geneticimprovement

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Crop diversity: opportunity

• Fundamental raw materials for crop improvement

• >7 M accessions in >1,700 genebanks

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Crop diversity: challenge

• Profoundly underutilized

• Searching for needle in a haystack

• Big, largely untapped opportunity

6%

94%

Maize allelic diversitySarah Hearne, CIMMYT

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Game-changers

• Increasing emphasis on using natural variation

• New technologies

Ed Buckler (Cornell): speed of DNA sequencing has increased 25 million-fold in 20 years

– From home office– From home sun

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Many projects out there

3,000 Rice Genomes Project (IRRI) ✔ ✔Seeds of Discovery (CIMMYT) ✔ ✔ ✔Digital Seed Bank (GPC) ✔ ✔ ✔

Crop Wild Relatives Project (Crop Trust) ✔ ✔ ✔

Convergence of ideas & concepts across crops

and organizations

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Diversity Seek

Networking of like-minded efforts to harness crop diversity for food security

White paper: http://www.divseek.org

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Cross-crop learning & integration

• Advocate common data standards and legal frameworks to assemble network of interoperable data sets & repositories

• Common research approaches for crops with similar biology• Cross-cutting tools and platforms & capacity-strengthening

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DivSeek stakeholders

• Demand-driven agricultural research– Broaden the genetic base of breeding programs

– Accelerate genetic gains

• Discovery-driven fundamental research– Stimulate discoveries that generate spill-over effects

into crop improvement

• Genebanks– From ‘warehouses’ to research centers that actively

investigate the genetic potential of their holdings

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First Partners’ Assembly

• 69 organizations from 30 countries signed expression of interest

• First Partners’ Assembly in Jan 2015

• Charter approved:– The mission of DivSeek is to cross-link, support and add

value to individual activities that harness the power of crop diversity for food and nutritional security and societal and economic benefits, by enabling breeders and researchers to mobilize genetic variation in order to accelerate crop improvement.

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DivSeek Facilitation Unit

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An invitation to join

[email protected]

www.divseek.org