The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the 2050 Food Challenge

The 2008 spike in food price shed light on possible scenarios of 2050 food security. The world human population is projected to 9.7 billion people by then. Men will have to face a changing climate, the effects of which might be even more devastating than the population increase. Besides temperature increase, climate scenarios imply threats like changes in position and distribution of arable lands, agricultural water availability, spreading of new pests and diseases, death of pollinators, etc. Many actions are needed to cope with these scenarios, one being breeding new crops producing twice as much food as today and capable of facing new biotic and abiotic stresses. A possible paradigm to address this need is to make use of the vast reservoir of traits present in the world collections of crops' genetic diversity. Starting with the pioneering works of Nazareno Strampelli in Italy and of Nicolai Vavilov in the former USSR, almost one century ago, and impelled by the quick transformations of agricultural systems following Norman Borlaug's green revolution, after World War II, many countries implemented conservation programmes aimed at safeguarding traditional crop varieties in order to maintain their genetic traits. This vast wealth of genetic resources, estimated in some 7.4 million different crop genotypes, is present in 1,750 different genebanks. In order to regulate how this wealth of gene could be exploited and how to reward the nations that had conserved them through the efforts of farmers and the poorest, the Food and Agricultural Organization stated negotiations aimed at agreeing to a common framework of actions. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture entered into force on 29 June 2004. The treaty has now been subscribed by 195 parties, including the European Union.