Food plant diversity is essential to food security, human health and nutrition, and culture, and is critical to agricultural sustainability. With the world facing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity accelerated by the climate crisis, we are launching a new global collaboration, the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants, to create a sustainable, coordinated global effort to enhance our food security and protect the planet’s edible biodiversity for future generations.
The Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants (GCCFP) is a collaboration led by the New York Botanical Garden, with support from Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the United States Botanic Garden, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
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Learn about the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants, its goals, and partners.
The Global Conservation Consortia (GCC), a program of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), mobilizes a network of institutions and experts to collaboratively develop and implement comprehensive conservation strategies for priority threatened plant groups.
The Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants focuses on conservation strategies for food plants and is guided by the following principles.
The overarching goals of the GCCFP are to:
Improve Documentation: Enhance global documentation of food plant diversity, ensuring data from botanic gardens, agricultural genebanks, and other repositories, as well as from on farm and in situ habitat conservation programs, is widely available.
Strengthen Conservation: Ensure food plant diversity is conserved more efficiently across botanic gardens, genebanks, and other repositories, as well as on farms and in natural habitats, enhancing effectiveness and building resilience of conservation efforts.
Increase Access and Use: Promote better distribution, sharing, and use of food plant diversity and associated data, encouraging efficient, cost-effective, and rational access policies.
Enhance Knowledge: Improve fundamental knowledge on food plant diversity, including taxonomy, systematics, uses, and conservation status assessments.
Increase Efficiency: Foster more effective collaboration and coordination among botanic gardens, genebanks, and other repositories, to improve ex situ conservation processes, including acquisition, processing, storage, and distribution of plant materials and associated data.
Recognize Complementarity: Define, report, communicate, and promote the complementary roles of botanic gardens, genebanks, and other repositories, as well as on farm and in situ habitat conservation programs, within international policy frameworks, ensuring their work is acknowledged and supported.
Build Capacity: Strengthen the capacity of stakeholders through shared training opportunities, knowledge exchange, and technical support, ensuring that institutions involved have the skills and tools necessary for long-term food plant diversity conservation, use, and awareness raising.
Raise Awareness: Inform practitioners, policy makers, and the public through outreach and education about the value of, and threats to, food plant diversity.
NYBG is proud to host the secretariat of the GCCFP along with the partners:
