ISF Secretary General Michael Keller joined the ‘Food Forever’ Experience organized by Crop Trust, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty), and the Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture at the House of Switzerland in Davos around the 2025 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting.
The Food Forever Experience event explores the critical role of crop diversity in securing global crop security and sustainability amid climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. It opened with high-level speeches from His Excellency Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin, Head of the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education, and Research, Switzerland, and His Excellency Ángel Manuel Manero Campos, Minister of Agrarian Development and Irrigation, Peru. This was followed by a keynote address by Dr Geoffrey Hawtin, OBE, 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who emphasized the urgent need for collective action to combat the chronic underfunding of genetic resources conservation and use and the consequences of inaction.
The panel discussion after the keynote address featured a diverse set of speakers representing the public and private sectors, moderated by the Crop Trust Executive Director Stefan Schmitz, who posed the questions: How can we increase our collective engagement on this work? How do we meaningfully share our problem statements so that the right people come to the table to help us solve them?
In his intervention, Michael Keller stated that genetic resources conservation goes hand in hand with the business goals of the private seed sector. To be able to come up with new, improved plant varieties, plant breeders need access to the broadest and most diverse possible pool of genetic resources, and so crop diversity is of utmost importance. The private seed sector contributes financially but also in kind to support the many gene banks all over the world, and what it needs is to have a workable solution to ensure access to and use of genetic resources.
For more information about the event, visit the event website.
