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Collectively, the Centres of the CGIAR house the world's largest
collections of major food crops, forage and agroforestry species,
maintaining some 600,000 samples in their genebanks. These collections,
held in trust for the world community, provide the foundation of the
breeding programmes and hold the key to our future supplies of food and
other basic necessities.
Managing these large collections, and the vast amount of
information gathered on them, poses very significant challenges.
Data on the origins of the samples, their special characteristics, their
performance in different environments and their distribution must
all be maintained and made readily available to the world community.
The growing global interest in genetic resources has resulted in
an increasing demand for information on the CGIAR collections as a
whole and greater transparency in their management. As a result, the
Centres developed the CGIAR's System-wide Information Network for
Genetic Resources (SINGER), a component of the System-wide Genetic
Resources Initiative (SGRP). SINGER is built on a network that links
together genetic resources databases managed by 12 of the CGIAR Centers.
It includes databases on the plant germplasm collections at 11 Centres a
of a research collection of fish germplasm held by ICLARM. It enhances
the genetic resources work of the CGIAR and provides a tool that allows
collaborators greater access to genetic resources collections and
related information.
With the successful establishment of SINGER the stage is now set
to consider the next step in its evolution as a truly system-wide
network, extending within the CGIAR including additional data and
beyond the CGIAR system as a contribution to the global system, to
provide information on a very wide range of agriculturally important
genetic resources. This would contribute greatly to promoting the
conservation of genetic resources as well as their use in sustainable
development. It would contribute to implementing the Clearing House
Mechanism, a priority activity of the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD), as well as the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and
Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
In order to involve the CGIAR community interested in the
development of SINGER and in particular to the implementation of its
second Phase, it was recommended to establish a discussion
forum. This discussion platform is intended to promote exchange of
views, follow up the on-going developments, look for answers on
specific problems and discuss matters of general interest regarding
SINGER.
You may reach all the members of SINGER-L by sending a message to
singer-l@lists.cgiar.org. Please note: You CANNOT use the "reply-to" function
to reply to the list. The return path "SINGER-L-postmaster" routes
messages to the list administrator, not to the list. To send a message
to the list, you will need to manually enter the e-mail address
singer-l@lists.cgiar.org
To unsubscribe, send a message to singer-l-leave@lists.cgiar.org
To see the collection of prior postings to the list,
visit the singer-l
Archives.
(The current archive is only available to the list
members.)
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