The demand for crop genetic resources: international use of the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System

In contrast to a perception that ex situ collections of germplasm are rarely used, this empirical case study reveals large quantities of germplasm samples distributed by the U.S. National Germplasm System to many types of scientific institutions located in numerous countries around the world. Distributions favor developing countries in several ways including the numbers of samples shipped, utilization rates in crop breeding programs, and the secondary benefits brought about through sharing this germplasm with other scientists. Expected future demand is also greater among scientists in developing countries. These findings underscore the importance to global science and technology of retaining such resources in the public domain.Germplasm resources, Plant Research., Germplasm conservation., Germplasm resources, Plant International cooperation. ,

The Origin, Development And Structure Of Demand For Plant Genetic Resources. The Impact Of The In Trust Agreements To The CGIAR Collections Availability

The objective of this paper is to explore how the demand of germplasm held by CGIAR genebanks changed over time in order to assess the possible influence of the 1994 In Trust Agreements on germplasm demand. The proposed theoretic model motivates the realistic hypothesis that the consequences of the In-Trust Agreements lead to an enhancement of CGIAR germplasm utilization. Therefore the paper firstly examines the classical literature on biodiversity’s valuation and its recent developments and subsequently it investigates the origin of the agricultural biodiversity’s economic value, providing a basic conceptual framework to infer on factors determining the demand for germplasm. Two Bayesian estimation frameworks are applied to the IRRI accessions distribution’s time-series to provide formal evidence to the hypothesis, exploiting Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, Gibbs sampling in particular. Evidence suggests that the demand variation implies a change in the genetic collections economic value, impacting therefore on their direct use search value.Crop genetic resources, germplasm collection, search theoretic framework, count data, changepoints, O19, Q18, Q57, C11,