ABSTRACT
A half-century lapsed between 1911 when Nikolai Vavilov joined the Bureau of Applied Botany in St Petersburg and when Erna Bennett and Otto Frankel convened the first international technical conference on plant genetic resources in 1961. Twenty years after that, crop genetics suddenly grew into a political intergovernmental debate during an FAO conference that, two years afterwards, created the International Undertaking and Commission on Plant Genetic Resources (IU). It took another couple of decades before the voluntary IU became a legally binding Treaty. When the Treaty’s Governing Body convened in Bali to assess its progress in 2011, it had an entire century, ‘a 100 Year Seed War’, for review and reflection.
