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In the late 1990s, the Australian chickpea industry fell victim to a fungal disease called ascochyta blight. Field after field of chickpea crops were devastated.
Plant breeders went to work, scouring the world for seeds with a natural resistance to the blight. It took years to develop a chickpea variety that could withstand the disease, but the crop eventually recovered.
"This is an absolute classic example of where a food crop was wiped out," says Tony Gregson, the chairman of Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute) based in Rome, and also an Australian farmer who witnessed it firsthand. "Imagine what would happen if [a crop as important as] wheat is wiped out," he said.
Also based in Rome is the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Its job is to prepare for even more frightening scenarios, and it is protecting food security by conserving crop diversity. With crops under serious threat from human development, ever-evolving diseases and climate change, the stakes are high.
Cary Fowler, the trust's executive director, knows the challenges. He travels the world to protect our crops – an often thankless job, but one of utmost importance. He is helping collect seeds to store in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway (see, Doomsday vault opens for business).
Nicknamed the "doomsday vault", the facility is built 130 m down inside an Arctic mountain. With its remote location and constant cold temperatures, the vault is designed to outlast anything from a nuclear blast to severe climate change.
Even under the most disturbing possible scenarios for global warming, the seeds will remain naturally frozen for up to 200 years. This seed sanctuary is crucial in the battle to conserve crop diversity, says Fowler, pointing to the example of the chickpea blight.
The Australian farmers planted what they believed to be the highest quality crops, and they were at the time, says Fowler. No one saw the ascochyta blight coming. "The world changes… pests and diseases slowly evolve, and today's best is tomorrow's lunch."
The lesson? Plant breeders must be prepared for anything. "No one has a perfect crystal ball, so we don't know what's coming next," Fowler says. "We just know that something is coming."
For plant breeders to successfully combat this uncertainty, they need to have a wide range of crop varieties at their disposal. Within each crop type, there is incredible diversity. Wheat alone has 200,000 distinct varieties, corn and chickpeas have 30,000 each, and even peanuts have 15,000.
