The Crop Trust is a small international non-profit organization that has an increasingly consequential mission: to conserve and make available the crop diversity whose disappearance threatens “the foundation of our food.”
It is launching an ambitious Global Conservation Strategy for Tea Genetic Resources, collaborating with the Tea Research Institute in China and drawing on centers in Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar plus field collections and seedling gardens that preserve small numbers of bush variety.
Tea is a local crop that has become global. Thousands of varieties have evolved in farming over millennia, but the bulk of today’s production comes from a much smaller domesticated gene pool. 80% of Japan’s teas are propagated from a single clonal varietal developed in the early 1900s and 90% of the acreage for tea growing is planted with five cultivars. African teas have the lowest genetic diversity among the main tea regions, which makes them increasingly vulnerable in global markets on which much of their economy, labor force, and foreign exchange revenues depend. Kenya, which provides 70% of the tea exported for blending and sale in the UK, has made premiumization a policy priority.
It needs new crops that are adaptive to its geography and environment. Climate and market change demands that all regions greatly expand variety, through combinations of clonal teas, re-introduction of local seed and bushes, conventional cross-breeding, and identification of plants with the resilience needed to address the many climate stresses that are becoming endemic rather than occasional. These include increased and erratic rainfall and cloud cover that has reduced soil temperatures and longer dry spells with constant threats of drought. One urgent need, for example, is for bushes that require less water and use of pesticides.
The more that this variety can be found in conserved sources of both wild and domesticated plants, the greater the options, the faster the targeted adaptation and deployment, and the ability to maintain crop yields and leaf quality. Tea poses particular problems in such conservation. It can’t be easily stored in frozen seed vaults but is best maintained in living plant conditions. The tea plants that are preserved by continued growth in small and special fields are vulnerable. There’s almost no “diversity duplication” and an entire genetic reserve can be wiped out in a flood or by new pests and diseases. There’s also no standardization of germplasm and genotyping and very limited sharing of information and resources.
The primary need is for a tea industry sense of a shared cause. It is well behind coffee, grains, and rice in meeting all these collaborative imperatives. The Crop Trust points to a comprehensive safeguarding platform that cost just $25 million to cover conservation of coffee gene banks “forever.” It asks why the tea industry hasn’t followed such an affordable collaborative path.
Its own plan is conceptually simple, and it seems well-positioned to be an industry conservation catalyst. It is strong in field experience across crops and geography. For example, it successfully commissioned over 100 scientists in 25 countries to search out and secure 4,600 seed samples of 371 wild relatives of key domesticated crops. The plan, supported by several leading tea firms, including Unilever, lists four priorities for global rather than national action:
1. Implement accessible document sharing on a unified platform
2. Develop and agree on international standards and technical guidelines for conservation, safety duplication, including crypto-preservation (a method for cooling organic materials, cells and tissues, typically to minus 80 degrees Celsius, to maintain them in undamaged living state), and exchange.
3. Coordinate a global genotyping initiative to inform and fill in gaps in collections.4. Agree on a global policy for exchange of diversity resources.