Crop Trust

Crop Trust
Type	International organisation funding gene banks
Website	croptrust.org
Founded	2004
Base	Bonn, Germany
Registered as	Global Crop Diversity Trust
Scope	Worldwide
Focus	Long-term funding of gene banks, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and gene bank data
Other sites	Genesys

The Crop Trust, formally the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is an international organisation that pays for the long-term conservation of crop seed and plants in gene banks. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Bioversity International established it in October 2004 on behalf of CGIAR, to support a global system of conservation through its Crop Diversity Endowment Fund. Its headquarters moved from Rome to Bonn in 2013. Cannabis reaches the Crop Trust's work through two of its programmes: the Genesys portal to gene bank catalogues and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, where gene banks keep safety duplicates of their seed.

Genesys and gene bank software

The Crop Trust has managed Genesys since 2013. The portal lets a user search the accessions of many gene banks through one website. On 13 November 2026 it listed 2,151 accessions of the genus Cannabis, not counting historic entries for material that gene banks no longer keep. The largest holders were the National Plant Germplasm System of the United States at Geneva, New York (569), the Institute of Bast Crops in Ukraine (495) and the Vavilov Institute in Russia (491). Gene banks publish their own data on the portal under an agreement with the Crop Trust and are asked to update it at least once a year.

With the United States Department of Agriculture, the Crop Trust began the GRIN-Global project in 2008 to give any crop gene bank a free catalogue system. It paid for part of the work with a large grant. It now coordinates GRIN-Global Community Edition, an open-source successor that adds barcoding and the use of hand-held devices.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Boxes of seed samples on the shelves inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 2008.

The seed vault on Svalbard was established in 2008 by Norway's Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) and the Crop Trust. Norway owns the vault, and the three partners manage it together. NordGen runs the facility and keeps a public database of the samples stored there. The Crop Trust pays towards its running costs and funds the preparation and shipping of seed from developing countries.

In 2026 the vault held more than 1.4 million seed samples from 134 institutions. It has room for 4.5 million. A depositor keeps ownership of its boxes. Only the institution that deposited a box can withdraw and open it. The first withdrawal came in 2015. The Syrian civil war had left the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) unable to keep up its gene bank in Syria, and between 2015 and 2019 it used seed from the vault to rebuild its collections in Lebanon and Morocco.

On 13 November 2026 the vault held 69 samples of Cannabis, deposited by six European gene banks. Fifty-three came from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research at Gatersleben in Germany. The rest came from gene banks in Austria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland and Sweden. The seed was collected in 20 countries, Germany, Romania and France most often among them. Two samples are from North Korea. Sixty-two of the current Cannabis accessions in Genesys have a safety duplicate there.

The endowment

Governments and other donors pay into the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund, which invests the money across several classes of assets. Each year, with the approval of the Executive Board, up to 4 per cent of the fund's average market value over the previous twelve quarters can be drawn to support gene banks. The fund was worth about USD 425 million on 30 June 2026. The Crop Trust estimates that a fund of USD 850 million would yield the roughly USD 34 million a year needed to keep the main crop collections in perpetuity. More than USD 106 million had been drawn since 2005.

The first long-term grant, in 2006, went to the rice collection of the International Rice Research Institute. The fund now supports the 11 international gene banks of CGIAR, which keep more than 750,000 samples of crops such as rice, maize and beans. It also supports the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees in Fiji, which keeps taro, yam and other Pacific staples, and the vegetable gene banks of the World Vegetable Center, with more than 65,000 varieties. It pays part of the vault's yearly costs and the costs of the secretariat in Bonn.

The Crop Trust also runs projects with money given for a fixed term. The BOLD project (Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development), launched in 2021 with USD 58 million from the government of Norway, runs for ten years and supports 15 national gene banks.

The Plant Treaty

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture came into force in 2004. In 2006 its Governing Body approved an agreement with the Crop Trust that made the Trust an essential element of the Treaty's funding strategy. The Governing Body appoints four members of the Crop Trust's Executive Board, which stays independent in running the Trust. In 2021 the two launched an Emergency Reserve for gene banks facing urgent threats. Twenty-eight countries have signed or acceded to the Crop Trust's Establishment Agreement.

See also

• Ex situ conservation
• Gene bank
• Genesys
• GRIN-Global
• National Plant Germplasm System