The Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is an international nonprofit organization with a secretariat in Bonn, Germany. Its mission is to conserve and make available the world's crop diversity for food security.
The Crop Trust provides financial support for key international and national genebanks that hold collections of diversity for food crops such as this genebank at ICRISAT in India.
The Crop Trust provides most of the annual operating costs for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Crop diversity or crop biodiversity is the variety and variability of crops, plants used in agriculture, including their genetic and phenotypic characteristics. It is a subset of a specific element of agricultural biodiversity. Over the past 50 years, there has been a major decline in two components of crop diversity; genetic diversity within each crop and the number of species commonly grown.
Within-crop diversity: maize cobs of differing colours
Biodiverse agroecosystem: traditional potato harvesting high in the Andes, Manco Kapac Province, Bolivia, 2012
Loss of low-diversity crop to a single disease: the Great Famine, caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans. Starvation followed, as illustrated by James Mahony, 1847
Wheat stem rust is evolving new, virulent strains, threatening many low-diversity cultivars.
