The World’s Third-Largest Seed Bank Established in Turkey

Ankara, Turkey | September 12, 2009 by D-8 Secretariat

D-8 Secretary General, Dipo Alam, and the Director General of Agriculture Research of Turkey, Masum Burak Ph.D, discuss and exchange views on further progress in Seed Bank

Construction on the seed bank has been launched with a ceremony in the capital city, Ankara, in late July 2009 by Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister Mehmet Mehdi Eker. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement: “We need to assess the current situation and protect our biological diversity and genetic sources. There are about 10,000 plant species and nearly 3,000 endemic plant species in Turkey. Turkey is considered a center for finding genes of a number of plant species of great importance for biological research. Therefore, we have decided to establish a seed gene bank in Turkey. The bank will contain genes from 250,000 plant species.”

The international community has set up seed banks, frequently known as gene banks, as a response to the loss of biodiversity. There are now 1,300 banks worldwide containing around 6 million acquisitions.

The world’s largest seed bank is managed by the Agriculture Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture. It holds more than 460,000 seed samples and has the capacity to store up to 1 million seeds.

D-8 Ministers of Agriculture Meeting on Food Security in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 25th -27th February 2009 has agreed to establish D-8 Seed Bank. It is also agreed that the activities for the establishment of D-8 Seed Bank would be leaded by Turkey in collaboration to Iran. In Kuala Lumpur Meeting, to have a workshop for the establishment of modalities of a downstream tri-lateral seed bank was included as strategic initiatives.

As the prime mover, TURKEY held the working group meeting between 21-24 July-2009 in Turkey. The meeting was successfully held with full participation from member countries in “International Agricultural Research and Training Centre-Menemen-İzmir/TURKEY”. In the first meeting of the working committee on the establishment of D-8 seed bank it was aimed that to establish modalities for downstream seed production through the establishment of National Seed Banks and a D-8 Umbrella Seed Bank and the draft agenda was prepared by Turkey accordingly.

In that light, D-8 Secretary General, Dipo Alam, paid a courtesy visit to Ankara last July to meet with the Director General of Agriculture Research of Turkey, Masum Burak Ph.D, discuss and exchange views on further progress to be achieved in this sector, as well as to extend appreciation and thank to the successfully held meeting in Izmir. Burak informed that the venue for the next meeting is Egypt and the date is February 2010 at the latest. During the talks, both figures stressed the importance of RoO (Rules of Origin) within the context of direct trade in agricultural among D-8 Countries.

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