On Sept. 18, 1967, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Biological Programme put on the second major conference on germplasm – marking the first time that the world’s scientific community recognized the need to conserve genetic resources.

The genetic resources of the plants by which we live are dwindling rapidly and disastrously. As development proceeds in the less advanced as in the more advanced areas of the world, the reserves of genetic variation, stored in the primitive crop varieties which had been cultivated over hundreds or thousands of years and in the primeval forests, equipped with a seemingly inexhaustible range of variation, have been or are being displaced by high-producing and uniform cultivars, and by forest plantations.

What is inevitable and essential progress in one direction is a calamitous deprivation in another – for the developing countries as much as for the developed ones. At a time when a continuing rise in productive efficiency is more essential than at any other for our very existence, plant breeding and plant introduction, perhaps the most powerful single weapon of agricultural improvement, are rapidly being deprived of the very raw materials upon which they depend.

This “erosion” of our biological resources may gravely affect future generations which will, rightly, blame ours for lack of responsibility and foresight. But at this very moment we are equally deprived, because many, one might say most, of these genetic resources are not available for general utilization by plant breeders, agronomists, foresters, horticulturists all the world over. This applies not only to the primitive cultivated crop varieties, but to the wild relatives of cultivated species on which we lean increasingly as sources for disease and pest resistance, specific nutritional qualities, etc.; and to the wild species of forest, range and pasture.

The efforts to explore and collect these invaluable resources are, on a world scale, inadequate, they are oriented by the interests of single nations or institutions, their results are not generally available or even generally known. Nor are there concerted, or even internationally agreed, efforts to preserve the material which has been assembled, or to conserve significant populations or sites in natural habitats in the gene centres, or elsewhere. The few examples of bilateral or multilateral agreements point the way to what can be achieved in a wider sphere.

The Preparatory Meeting of the Conference received accounts from leading scientists from many countries of the biological background underlying the variation in plants useful to man, and of the ways it can be explored, evaluated, harnessed to man’s need, and preserved for the future, and discussed ways in which national efforts can be made more fruitful by concerted international co-ordination and co-operation. 

The scientists recommended to FAO, member governments and international organizations as appropriate, that an action programme for the coming years, and an organization which can put it into effect, be initiated.