José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is joining scientific experts and delegations from Peru, Costa Rica and Norway to witness a ceremony that will help to preserve these vital crops for future generations.

The deposit is being made at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a back-up facility in the permafrost far north of the Arctic Circle that currently holds over 860,000 food crop seeds from all over the world. Its operation is co-funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, whose mission is to conserve the planet's crop diversity for the food security of current and future generations, and the government of Norway.

Representatives of indigenous Andean communities who worked together to establish the Parque de la Papa, in Cusco, Peru, will deposit 750 potato seeds. The seeds are the result of benefit-sharing projects supported by FAO's International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The farmers will be joined by scientists from the Center for Agricultural Research at the University of Costa Rica, who will also be adding wild potato relatives to the largest agro-biodiversity collection in the world.

The potato: A humble giant

The potato originated in the Andes of South America. Over the centuries, Andean farmers have bred over 2,000 varieties in all shapes, colours and sizes. In addition, there are dozens of wild relatives of the potato stretching from Uruguay to Arizona. The potato is now the world's third-most consumed food, feeding more than a billion people every day. This remarkable tuber, which is low in fat but high in protein, calcium and vitamin C, is grown on every continent where people live.

However, changing climate and diseases such as potato blight − which causes $8.5 billion worth of potato losses every year in the developing world alone − pose a significant challenge to this priceless natural resource, as do the modernization of agriculture and changes in land-use. Many potato varieties have been lost in recent decades, both to the Andean communities from which they originated, and to the global community as a whole.

In response, a coalition of local, regional and international partners joined forces to reintroduce potato varieties in the field, and to preserve these vital plant genetic resources in genebanks. The Peru-based International Potato Centre (CIP), home to the world's largest potato crop collection, is working to preserve and reintroduce the diversity of potatoes in partnership with local and regional initiatives across the globe. Working with Asociación ANDES-IIED and Parque de la Papa, CIP has, since 2002, returned over 400 potato accessions to indigenous communities. International treaty supports sharing of knowledge

The sharing of such plant genetic resources across national boundaries is facilitated by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

The Treaty, which is hosted at FAO, works through a multilateral system of access and benefit-sharing that helps ensure that farmers and researchers have access to a large diversity of seeds and other plant genetic material and a fair share of the benefits resulting from any new varieties. The genetic information held in many crop varieties and wild plants supports the development of new fast-growing, high-yielding crops, as well as varieties that are more resistant to heat, drought, salinity, pests and diseases, all critical traits in a warming world.

For example, with funding from the Treaty's Benefit Sharing Fund, and further support from the Crop Trust, farmers involved in the Parque de la Papa learned how to pollinate their potatoes and collect seeds for storage. Some of the seeds were used to develop new varieties to feed their communities, while others were prepared and shipped to Svalbard for today's deposit.

FAO Director-General, José Graziano da Silva, and the depositors from Peru and Costa Rica will be greeted by Marie Haga, Executive Director of the Crop Trust, Hanne Maren Blaafjelldal, State Secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food at 17:50 local time and escorted deep into the subterranean storage vault for the deposit.

A shared effort, a common good

Founded ten years ago by FAO and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Crop Trust is the international organization devoted solely to safeguarding the world's crop diversity. To this end, it is seeking to raise a total of USD 500 million, which will guarantee the maintenance and availability of key international plant collections of critical importance to our food supply, including that of CIP.

Norway is one of the biggest supporters of the Crop Trust's work. It currently funds a ten-year global project that seeks to safeguard the wild relatives of the important food crops. And it is thanks to the generous support of the Norwegian people and government that the Seed Vault has become a reality.

From 2006-11, while heading FAO's Regional Office for Latin America, Graziano da Silva actively supported crop conservation initiatives, including the Parque de la Papa. Today, fouryears later, and many miles from the Andes, he will oversee the seed deposit that assures potato diversity will be safeguarded for the future.