ABSTRACT
The international crop and forage collections conserved and hosted by the International Agricultural Research Centres (IARCs), which are supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), have long played a key supportive role in national and international public agricultural research and plant breeding. The genetic resources in these collections are an important source of diversity for plant breeders and farmers to develop crops and forages with the ability to resist pests and diseases, withstand climactic stresses and grow in degraded soils. It is widely predicted that access to such diversity will be increasingly important as countries struggle to meet the challenges of climate change (FAO, 2011; Fujisaka et al., 2009; Ramirez-Villegas et al., 2010). The international collections conserved and hosted by the CGIAR centres have been built up over decades. They currently include 746,611 accessions of crops and forages collected from over 100 countries (see the CGIAR’s SINGER database from 2011). Most countries in the world do not have the resources to assemble and maintain collections of similar size and diversity, and therefore they need to rely on access to these international collections. Apart from transfers of genetic materials between the centres themselves, approximately 81 per cent of the materials distributed from the international collections have gone to developing countries and countries with economies in transition, and 19 per cent have gone to developed countries (CGIAR, 2006). The vast majority of these transfers – approximately 94 per cent – have gone to public research organizations, universities, regional organizations, germplasm networks and gene banks (SGRP, 2011).
