Save, Share and Sow Vegetable Seeds: Core activities at Worldveg’s International Vegetable Genebank
Diversify diets and farmer fields with wide range of options
Current food systems require transformation to support both human and planetary health. Vegetable biodiversity holds great potential to improve nutrition, livelihoods, and climate resilience. However, vegetable biodiversity is declining rapidly and remains underrepresented in conservation and seed exchange efforts, receiving significantly less investment than staple crops. This decline leads to the irreversible loss of opportunities to transform food systems for present and future generations.
Seed distribution of WorldVeg’s International Vegetable Genebank
The World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) maintains the International Vegetable Genebank, the world’s largest public collection of vegetable genetic resources. As of March 2024, its active collection comprises 55,270 accessions, providing essential resources for diversifying diets and farming systems. This collection is complemented by Africa’s Vegetable Genebank, which has over 5,900 accessions.
The genebank safeguards vegetable biodiversity, supports crop diversification for improved human nutrition and climate resilience, and offers genetic traits for breeding programs. These traits enhance abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, improve product quality, and contribute to the domestication and evolution of resilient vegetable crops, particularly benefiting smallholder farmers and resource-poor populations.
All legally available genebank accessions are included in the Multilateral System (MLS) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). This ensures global access under Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) conditions. Since its founding in 1972, WorldVeg has distributed over 700,000 seed samples of genebank accessions and breeding lines globally.
Seed Regeneration and Conservation Efforts
A key aspect of genebank management is seed regeneration, ensuring seed viability and availability for breeding and research. Seed accessions are renewed through sowing and harvesting, generating fresh seed while maintaining original genetic characteristics. However, seed regeneration is costly and often deprioritized, particularly for accessions with low demand. Many heirloom varieties from Southeast Asia collected in the 1990s and 2000s now exist only in the genebank due to limited seed quantities and declining viability. WorldVeg aims to distribute more of these seeds, but regeneration is necessary before they can be shared.
To address this, WorldVeg has partnered with citizen regenerators in Taiwan—farmers, seed companies, and agricultural organizations—who assist in seed regeneration. These partners receive training in seed multiplication, trait assessment, and genebank protocols. In return, they gain access to rare landraces. A meeting of these regenerators at WorldVeg headquarters in June 2024 highlighted the initiative’s success, with 60% of surveyed participants identifying promising accessions with desirable traits such as high yield, disease resistance, early maturity, and superior fruit quality.
Genebank review panel visiting the mid-term storage of WorldVeg’s International Vegetable Genebank in Taiwan.
This type of phenotypic data supports users worldwide in selecting the accessions that serve their purposes. So far, WorldVeg has made available 23 phenotypic datasets, 1 dataset of nutrition survey, 2 datasets of disease evaluation, and 2 datasets with molecular markers associated with disease resistance covering 28,127 accessions of 22 crops on the Genesys portal, facilitating research, breeding, and testing efforts. More phenotypic data will be uploaded to Genesys in the coming year.
Since 2018, WorldVeg has expanded collaborations with seed companies and institutions in Taiwan, the Netherlands, Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand to regenerate seeds and establish a global network of custodians and users. Now, WorldVeg is working with other genebanks to rescue shelved accessions and scale up conservation efforts in biodiversity hotspots across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. These efforts aim to provide sufficient options to diversify diets and farming systems.
A Global Vegetable Initiative
Recognizing the urgency of these efforts, global experts convened at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy, from March 3-7, 2025, to develop a Global Vegetable Initiative. This gathering included 19 thought leaders and representatives from governments, youth organizations, farmers, international institutions, academia, and the private sector. The event underscored the critical need to accelerate the rescue, conservation, and use of vegetable biodiversity worldwide.
WorldVeg was honored to host this convening, with ACIAR represented by Dr. Bosibori Bett, Director of Multilateral and Strategic Partnerships. The participants agreed on the importance of vegetable biodiversity for nutrition, livelihoods, and climate resilience. They emphasized that securing vegetable biodiversity could also serve as a model for other underrepresented food groups, such as fruits and nuts.
The meeting resulted in a consensus to establish the Global Vegetable Initiative as a unique nexus of biodiversity, agriculture, and health. The initiative aims to rescue, conserve, and utilize vegetable landraces and their wild relatives globally. Participants encouraged WorldVeg to lead this initiative in partnership with CGIAR, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust), and key regional and national stakeholders. They called for funding from the Power of Diversity Funding Facility (PDFF) of the Crop Trust and other co-investment mechanisms to support the initiative’s implementation.
Nineteen thought leaders came together in Bellagio to validate and endorse the global vegetable biodiversity imitative with ACIAR represented by Dr. Bosibori Bett, Director of Multilateral and Strategic Partnerships
A Call to Action
All stakeholders—governments, research institutions, the private sector, and civil society—are urged to join this collective effort. By working collaboratively, we can rescue, conserve, and sustainably utilize vegetable biodiversity, ensuring its role in achieving nutritious diets, improved livelihoods, and climate resilience for future generations.
This message also starts to resonate with the wider public. Two key news articles were published in 2024 by the renowned Australian journalist, Natalie Parletta, in the Cosmos magazine and the Guardian, explaining the need to rescue, conserve, and use vegetable biodiversity.
