WorldVeg genebank staff with the shipment prepared for Svalbard

In June, 22 boxes containing 8,550 samples of 178 species of vegetable, aromatic and medicinal plants sent from the WorldVeg genebank in Taiwan, were deposited for safekeeping in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This coincided with the second opening of the vault in 2023, and WorldVeg’s 50th anniversary year.

Genebank manager Maarten van Zonneveld was interviewed by the Crop Trust at that time, and answered a range of questions about what this batch contained, and the value of genebanks, and long term storage.

For the full article – Greens from Asia for the World – Crop Trust (8 June 2023)

Amongst his responses, he said “Vegetables play an important role in the diversification of cropping systems for healthy diets in a changing climate. To address this issue, WorldVeg, Crop Trust and other organizations proposed a 10-year Global Rescue Plan at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. With this we aim to reverse the decline in vegetable biodiversity by rescuing and safeguarding threatened vegetable varieties and their wild relatives.”

“At WorldVeg, we are proud to maintain a key global collection of vegetable diversity. Our active collection has over 70,000 seed samples, which makes it the largest international collection of vegetable germplasm in the public domain. Our main genebank holds a collection of about 65,000 accessions. Our other genebank is Tanzania and holds a unique collection of some 5,000 accessions of traditional African vegetables.”

Inside the WorldVeg genebank and its headquarters in Taiwan, and boxes being packed