The Great garlic homecoming:
Rare farmer varieties return to the Philippines after 30 years abroad
Several rare garlic varieties – once common on Philippine farms but now nearly impossible to find – are returning home after more than three decades of conservation at the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) in Taiwan.
Garlic is crucial to local cuisine and farmer livelihoods in the Philippines, and locally grown landraces (farmer varieties) are prized for their aroma and richer flavour compared to imported types. But farmers face challenges growing it in hot, pest-prone environments with production declining in recent years and the country importing a large share of its supply.
Jessica Chang of the WorldVeg genebank in Taiwan checks a tissue culture sample of garlic. Pic by Neil Palmer (WorldVeg).
In the early 1990s, 38 landraces of garlic were collected by researchers in the Philippines and sent to WorldVeg for long-term conservation. Now, after thirty years of conservation in Taiwan, a shipment of 228 garlic plants – representing 12 accessions – has been sent by WorldVeg to the International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF) in Manila. After phytosanitary checks by the Bureau of Plant Industry, TaiwanICDF will multiply the samples, and test the plants for heat tolerance. Once evaluated, planting material will be distributed to farmers.
The work follows a 2023 external review of the WorldVeg genebank, which recommended that the center’s garlic collection be increased, and made available to users.
Jessica Chang of the WorldVeg genebank in Taiwan checks a tissue culture sample of garlic. Pic by Neil Palmer (WorldVeg).
“Many of these varieties disappeared from fields in the Philippines years ago due to pest problems, disease, and the influx of cheaper imported garlic,” said Jessica Chang, Assistant Specialist at the WorldVeg genebank in Taiwan, who spent five months preparing the samples for shipment. “By sending them back home, we’re supporting work to restore an important part of the Philippines’ agricultural heritage, while hopefully providing farmers with more resilient options for the future.”
Culture of conservation
In many hot, humid parts of Asia – including the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia, and Taiwan – garlic cannot naturally flower or produce seed, so it must be propagated each year by planting bulbs. This leaves the crop vulnerable to losses from bad weather, pests, or pathogens.
For thirty years, the WorldVeg genebank conserved these garlic accessions in field locations -painstaking work, due to the risk of adverse weather, pests and diseases. In 2024, to improve conservation efforts and support the distribution of planting material, WorldVeg switched to conserving garlic via tissue culture. This laboratory method propagates garlic from shoot cuttings, growing them in tubs and test tubes under climate-controlled conditions free of pests and diseases.
A tissue culture sample of garlic at the World Vegetable Center genebank in Taiwan. Pic by Neil Palmer (WorldVeg).
The shipment of garlic follows similar seed repatriations in 2024, which saw over 1,200 accessions of 21 crops – including shallot, tomato, pepper, eggplant, mungbean and cowpea – sent from the WorldVeg genebank in Taiwan to the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory of the Institute of Plant breeding of the University of Los Baños, as part of the Taiwan Asia Vegetable Initiative (TASVI).
WorldVeg expects to send the remaining 25 accessions of garlic to the Philippines in 2026.
“This is exciting work on many levels,” said Maarten van Zonneveld, Head of the Genetic Resources at WorldVeg. “It opens up a number of new and exciting opportunities in terms of long-term garlic conservation and use, and it gives us more options to work in the Philippines and countries such as Indonesia, and Thailand, where garlic is crucial in local dishes.”
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