Jeff Bezos will invest $ 17 million in the seeds of the future - science

The The Bezos Earth Fund has committed $17 million to Seeds of the Future, the new germplasm bank for the Bioversity International-Ciat Alliance Opened today in Palmyra, Valle del Cauca.

As confirmed by Christian Samper, member of the Alliance Board of Directors, the funds will be used to support the Seed Bank, which includes one of the largest collections of beans, cassava and tropical forages in the world, and Climate Change Mitigation Science focused on carbon sequestration using plant root systems.

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Palmyra is one of eleven international germplasm banks of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), sponsored by the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and the United Nations Development Programme.

Now, with the new combinations of The seeds of the future will be the world’s largest bank of germplasm for these three crops, essential to human nutrition. The installation will replace Alianza Bioversity and Ciat’s original bank, which has already outgrown its capacity, after 40 years of working feeding and maintaining a collection of about 67,000 items collected from around the world.

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“This project that we are opening today began nine years ago in a conversation with Dr. Joe Tohme, with Robin Echavarria, when we were thinking about the need to build a new core bank that would really be a modern bank: We set three goals: to protect, to use and to educate,” Samper noted, during The opening, an event that included the participation of the President of the Republic, Ivan Duque.

A few weeks ago, billionaire Jeff Bezos visited the Bank’s new facilities, a sustainable infrastructure designed by Colombian architects, which is now hoped to speed up genetic sequencing of the species it inhabits, to tap into the potential it contains. in improving software.

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The new building was built in the past two years, thanks to an investment of $17.2 million from funders such as the Government of Colombia, the United Kingdom and Germany, the Sall Family Foundation, the Santo Domingo Foundation and the Global Crop Diversity Fund, in addition to private funds from the Bioversity-Ciat Alliance.

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