CLAUDIA SADOFF; December 23, 2021 (IRRI)

Figure: The genetic material needed to help smallholder farmers grow crops that survive the effects of climate change is in the seeds stored at genebanks all over the world.

A  recent Twitter conversation between the UN’s David Beasley and Tesla’s Elon Musk has shown that hunger is deceptively complex. There is a crucial difference between acute hunger, caused by shocks like war or natural disasters, and chronic hunger, which occurs when agricultural production (and distribution) fails to keep pace with threats such as soil degradation, erratic rainfall, or heatwaves, or when poverty renders food unaffordable.

This means that ending hunger requires both rapid response efforts during crises and sustained investment to protect our future food supply over the long term. Philanthropists like Mr. Musk who seek to “solve world hunger” should also be encouraged to tackle chronic hunger, as this offers long-term, systemic solutions–much like equity in a business that keeps paying dividends year after year.   

A visionary philanthropic opportunity would be the creation of an endowment to support the 11 genebanks held as international public goods by CGIAR, securing in perpetuity the agrobiodiversity we need to feed the world.

Genebanks, which are repositories for genetic material, represent the biological foundation of global food systems, past, present, and future. They are the equivalent of our agricultural intellectual property, and they essentially offer open-source, patent-free “code” for crop breeders anywhere in the world–or potentially other planets–to develop varieties that are more resilient and nutritious and need less water and land.

The genebanks, which are spread over five continents and include a genetic library that survived the war in Syria, contain the most comprehensive back catalog of crop traits and their original or wild relatives. They also form a network that sends duplicate samples to the Doomsday Vault buried in the permafrost on Svalbard island near the North Pole.

See https://fortune.com/2021/12/23/seed-funding-how-more-billionaires-elon-musk-un-row-can-help-end-world-hunger-genebanks-agriculture-cgiar-claudia-sadoff/