CGIAR's 11 genebanks preserve and regenerate some 750,000 varieties of crops that are important for food security. A majority of them are sourced from local farming environments and communities with an eye towards securing this critical legacy of human-kind and ensureing that enough genetic diversity is available to help with global food security challenges, such as climate adaptation. International agreements like the Nagoya Protocol, the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Internaitonal Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture enshrine the idea that the benefits of commercialization of genetic material should accrue at least in part back to communities and countries of origin of those resources, and CGIAR strives to be a responsible steward of these resources. As gene sequencing technology improves and becomes more accessible, increasingly the genetic resource need not be actual physical material, it can be genomics data instead. How can we navigate the resulting complexities so the benefits of the data use accue where they should?
