ICRISAT Wins Long-Term Funding to Protect Global Legume Seed Bank

28 September 2026, Telangana, India: The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics has secured long-term funding from the Crop Trust to permanently safeguard its collections of chickpea, pigeonpea, and groundnut, three legume crops that underpin food and nutrition security for hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. The agreement, announced by the Crop Trust on September 12, channels support through the Trust’s endowment fund, a mechanism designed to fund genebank operations in perpetuity rather than through short-term grants that can lapse and put irreplaceable genetic material at risk.

ICRISAT, headquartered in Hyderabad, holds more than 50,000 seed samples across the three legume crops in its genebank, a collection built over decades through field collection, farmer donations, and breeding programs across dryland regions where these crops are staples. As of December 2025, the institute had distributed over 1.72 million seed samples to researchers and breeders in 151 countries, making it one of the most heavily used genetic resource collections in the world for these particular crops. The new funding will support the routine but essential work of keeping such a collection viable: regenerating seed stocks that lose viability over time, maintaining backup duplicates at other sites in case of disaster, testing samples for quality, and continuing to distribute material on request to plant breeders worldwide.

Dr Himanshu Pathak, ICRISAT’s Director General, and Crop Trust officials including Executive Director Dr Stefan Schmitz and Director of Science and Programs Dr Sarada Krishnan were named in the announcement, which framed the funding as recognition of the outsized economic returns that genebank-backed breeding work can generate. As one illustration, the announcement cited a single groundnut variety developed using genetic diversity from ICRISAT’s collection, GPBD 4, which is estimated to have generated close to 185 million dollars in economic benefits in India alone between 2006 and 2022, primarily by giving farmers a variety resistant to foliar diseases that previously depressed yields.

Why genebanks matter more as climate risk grows

Genebanks like ICRISAT’s function as a kind of insurance policy for agriculture. As breeders work to develop crop varieties that can withstand heat stress, erratic rainfall, and new pest and disease pressures brought on by a changing climate, they depend on access to the wide genetic diversity held in collections such as this one to find traits that conventional commercial varieties have lost through generations of selection for yield and uniformity. Pulses in particular, chickpea and pigeonpea among them, are increasingly promoted by governments and nutrition programs as affordable, plant-based protein sources and as crops that fix nitrogen in the soil, reducing farmers’ dependence on synthetic fertilizer. A well-funded, well-maintained legume genebank therefore has relevance well beyond research circles, feeding directly into national breeding programs, seed company variety pipelines, and government efforts to diversify cropping systems away from water-intensive staples.

The funding announcement did not disclose a specific dollar figure or contract duration, describing the support only as long-term and channeled through the Crop Trust’s endowment structure, which is designed to generate a steady annual payout from an invested capital base rather than being drawn down over a fixed grant period.

Relevance for India and global seed and input companies

For Indian and global seed companies, this is more than an academic funding story. India remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of chickpea and pigeonpea, and a large share of the improved varieties grown by Indian farmers today trace their disease resistance or drought tolerance back to material originally held in ICRISAT’s collection. Seed companies developing new pulse hybrids, government breeding institutes, and even fertilizer companies promoting nitrogen-fixing legumes as part of soil health programs all depend, directly or indirectly, on this kind of long-term conservation infrastructure remaining intact and accessible. A disruption to genebank funding anywhere in the world, by contrast, narrows the raw genetic material available for the next generation of climate-resilient varieties, a risk that a secure, endowment-backed funding model is specifically designed to prevent.

The announcement comes as India and other governments across South Asia and Africa continue to push pulse self-sufficiency programs, making the underlying genetic security of these crops a matter of direct relevance to national food policy, not just to gene bank curators.

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