FAO: Ancient Peruvian potato crops preserved for future generations in Arctic seed vault

The deposit was made at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a back-up facility in the permafrost far north of the Arctic Circle that currently holds over 860,000 food crop seeds from all over the world. Its operation is co-funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose mission is to conserve the planet's crop diversity for the food security of current and future generations, and the government of Norway.

Representatives of indigenous Andean communities who worked together to establish the Parque de la Papa, in Cusco (Peru) have deposited 750 potato seeds. Those are the result of benefit-sharing projects supported by FAO's International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The farmers were joined by scientists from the Center for Agricultural Research at the University of Costa Rica, who also added wild potato relatives to the largest agro-biodiversity collection in the world.

The potato originated in the Andes of South America. Over the centuries, Andean farmers have bred over 2,000 varieties in all shapes, colours and sizes. In addition, there are dozens of wild relatives of the potato stretching from Uruguay to Arizona.

The potato is now the world's third-most consumed food, feeding more than a billion people every day. This remarkable tuber, which is low in fat but high in protein, calcium and vitamin C, is grown on every continent where people live. 

However, changing climate and diseases such as potato blight - which causes $8.5 billion worth of potato losses every year in the developing world alone - pose a significant challenge to this priceless natural resource, as do the modernization of agriculture and changes in land-use. Many potato varieties have been lost in recent decades, both to the Andean communities from which they originated, and to the global community as a whole.

In response, a coalition of local, regional and international partners joined forces to reintroduce potato varieties in the field, and to preserve these vital plant genetic resources in genebanks. The Peru-based International Potato Centre (CIP), home to the world's largest potato crop collection, is working to preserve and reintroduce the diversity of potatoes in partnership with local and regional initiatives across the globe. Working with Asociación ANDES-IIED and Parque de la Papa, CIP has, since 2002, returned over 400 potato accessions to indigenous communities. 

The sharing of such plant genetic resources across national boundaries is facilitated by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. 

The Treaty, which is hosted at FAO, works through a multilateral system of access and benefit-sharing that helps ensure that farmers and researchers have access to a large diversity of seeds and other plant genetic material - and a fair share of the benefits resulting from any new varieties.

The genetic information held in many crop varieties and wild plants supports the development of new fast-growing, high-yielding crops - as well as varieties that are more resistant to heat, drought, salinity, pests and diseases, all critical traits in a warming world.

For example, with funding from the Treaty's Benefit Sharing Fund, and further support from the Crop Trust, farmers involved in the Parque de la Papa learned how to pollinate their potatoes and collect seeds for storage. Some of the seeds were used to develop new varieties to feed their communities, while others were prepared and shipped to Svalbard for today's deposit.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva and the depositors from Peru and Costa Rica were greeted by Marie Haga, Executive Director of the Crop Trust, Hanne Maren Blaafjelldal, State Secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food at 17:50 local time and escorted deep into the subterranean storage vault for the deposit.