Safeguarding the Food Plants of the Future: A Global Mission
By Victoria Read
With the world facing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity accelerated by the climate crisis, a significant new global initiative has been launched to protect the extraordinary diversity of the plants that feed us. The Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants (GCCFP), launched in September 2025 and led by the New York Botanical Garden, brings together an impressive group of partners — among them the Crop Trust, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the US Botanic Garden, and CGIAR — in a coordinated effort to enhance global food security and protect edible biodiversity for future generations.
The Consortium's work spans the full spectrum of conservation — from improving global documentation of food plant diversity, to strengthening how that diversity is conserved across botanic gardens, genebanks, and natural habitats. It seeks to increase access to and use of food plant collections, build capacity among institutions worldwide, and raise awareness among policymakers and the public about just how much is at stake. Food plants, in the Consortium's broad definition, encompass not only our cultivated crops but their wild relatives and the many foraged and wild-harvested edible species that communities around the world depend upon.
For those of us who care deeply about gardens and the plant world, this is a cause that resonates. Botanical gardens have always been places of collection, preservation, and knowledge — and the GCCFP recognises the vital and complementary role they play alongside agricultural genebanks in securing our edible heritage. It is heartening to see such a breadth of the world's leading institutions uniting around this work.
To learn more about the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants, visit nybg.org/gccfp.