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Abstract
AVRDC The World Vegetable Center maintains one of the world’s largest international public genebanks at its headquarters in Taiwan. This collection of diverse vegetable genetic resources contains 67,817 accessions and sub-accessions comprising 170 genera and 436 species from 156 countries. Since its establishment in 1973, AVRDC has distributed close to 590,000 seed samples from its collection to researchers and breeders in 200 countries. Each year the Center’s Genetic Resources and Seed Unit in Taiwan distributes seed samples of 6,000 to 7,000 accessions and breeding lines to the public and private sector as well as to AVRDC scientists for crop improvement programs and related research worldwide, thereby contributing to global food and nutrition security. The ex-situ conservation of vegetable genetic resources and dissemination of germplasm to researchers and breeders worldwide carries considerable costs. The objective of this study is to estimate these costs for the 12-month period from September 2011 to August 2012 using the Decision Support Tool (DST) developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Based on these costs in the reference year, we estimate the funds required to conserve and disseminate AVRDC’s expanding collection of vegetable genetic resources. We estimated that the present value of capital assets of AVRDC’s genebank in Taiwan is USD 1.99 million for the facilities and USD 0.48 million for the equipment. The annualized cost of these assets is USD 0.107 million. This is a relatively small part (16%) of the total annual cost of USD 0.684 million. Labor costs constitute 74% of the annual cost of the AVRDC genebank, confirming previous studies on genebanks of the CGIAR that showed genebanks are more labor intensive than capital intensive. The average conservation and dissemination cost per accession is USD 10.08. Seed regeneration, seed processing and seed dissemination are the three most costly operations of the genebank. The storage itself only contributes 17% of the cost. In comparison, the average cost per accession is USD 5.5 at ICARDA, USD 6.84 at CIMMYT, USD 8.62 at ICRISAT, USD 9.19 at IRRI, and USD 22.54 at CIAT. High labor costs in Taiwan increase AVRDC’s average cost, but the fact that more vegetable species are self-pollinating and thus less labor intensive to regenerate than cross-pollinating species keeps the average costs in check. Seed processing and shipment fees, introduced by AVRDC in 2009, were able to recover 84% of the cost for dissemination and distribution. The introduction of fees was able to limit seed requests by single institutions for very large numbers of accessions, which was particularly costly for the genebank. However, it has also led to a significant reduction in seed requests, particularly from public institutions in developing countries. Assuming that the cost and cost structure observed in the reference year remain unchanged in real terms and assuming an average real (net of inflation) interest rate of 4% per annum, we estimate that the current conservation and dissemination efforts at AVRDC could be sustained in perpetuity by an endowment fund of USD 17.1 million. If the current collection continues to grow at 1.9% per annum, as it did over the past 18 years, than the endowment would have to be USD 32.1 million. Although this number might seem high, it will be very small compared to the past and future benefits from vegetable crop improvement.