The Ethiopian biodiversity institute at 50: celebrating a legacy and confronting new realities

For fifty years, the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute has protected one of the world’s richest reservoirs of crop diversity while helping shape global debates on seed systems and biodiversity governance. As the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (EBI) marks its golden jubilee, this reflection celebrates the legacy of one of Africa’s most influential scientific institutions while asking whether it is prepared for the technological, political, and institutional transformations reshaping biodiversity and food systems worldwide.

Some institutions store documents. Others guard money, weapons, or state secrets. The EBI protects something far more fragile and far more important for the future. It protects the seeds, genetic diversity, and farmer knowledge that underpin food security, climate resilience, and the survival of future agriculture. For fifty years, it has safeguarded one of the world’s richest reservoirs of crop diversity while helping shape global debates on farmers’ rights, access to genetic resources, and biodiversity governance.

That is why the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, known throughout its history as the Plant Genetic Resources Center/Ethiopia (PGRC/E), the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation and Research (IBCR), the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC), and now EBI, is more than a government agency. It is one of Africa’s most historically important scientific institutions and a living repository of survival. For fifty years, EBI has protected one of the world’s richest reservoirs of crop diversity. It has conserved more than 90,000 accessions in a cold storage facility and thousands more in field genebanks, including globally important coffee collections. Long before concepts such as farmers’ rights, access and benefit sharing, and seed sovereignty entered international policy discussions, Ethiopian scientists and farmers were already shaping those debates through practice and experience.

As someone who once worked at the institute and whose academic life remains deeply connected to plant genetic resources, biodiversity governance, and seed systems, I believe EBI deserves sincere celebration. But institutions that genuinely matter must also be challenged to renew themselves and respond to a changing world.

Long before Ethiopia established a national genebank, the country already possessed what the world was searching for. When scientists such as Nikolai Vavilov and later Jack Harlan traveled through Ethiopia in the twentieth century, they encountered astonishing diversity in barley, wheat, sorghum, coffee, teff, enset, pulses, and oil crops. Ethiopia appeared to outsiders as a biological wonderland.

But what they were seeing was not simply nature being generous to the country. It was the result of centuries of farmers’ knowledge and survival. Ethiopian farmers selected seeds from plants that survived drought, disease, frost, pests, poor soils, and hunger. They maintained diversity because diversity provided security in uncertain environments. Over generations, Ethiopian farms became living laboratories of crop evolution.

That diversity later became globally important. Ethiopian barley carries resistance to diseases such as barley yellow dwarf virus, powdery mildew, and net blotch. Ethiopian wheat contributed valuable traits for disease resistance and adaptation. Ethiopian coffee remains one of the world’s most important genetic resources for future breeding and climate adaptation.

In crop science, there was a phrase that deserves revival today: genetic defense. Modern agriculture depends on narrow genetic foundations and repeatedly turns to places like Ethiopia for traits that help crops survive disease, climate stress, and future uncertainty. Ethiopia’s crop diversity is therefore not only a national heritage. It is part of the world’s agricultural security system.

By the 1970s, scientists realized this diversity was disappearing. Improved varieties were spreading rapidly and replacing diverse local crop varieties. Forests and habitats of crop wild relatives were shrinking. Drought and famine disrupted local seed systems. Valuable landraces were being lost before researchers fully understood what they contained. This was the moment at which the PGRC/E was established in 1976.

What Ethiopia built was far more than a seed storage facility. PGRC/E quickly became one of Africa’s leading genebanks and remained the continent’s biggest genebank. Its scientists carried out collecting missions across the country, rescued seed diversity from disappearing, and developed systems for regeneration, storage, characterization, and documentation. Even during years of poverty, war, and famine, Ethiopia invested in conserving genetic resources that much of the world considered essential for the future of agriculture.

EBI also developed a philosophy that later made it globally influential. The institute refused to treat conservation as something separate from farmers and farming systems. That approach was not abstract theory. It emerged from the harsh realities of the 1980s famine, when many farming communities lost the seeds they depended on for survival. Some farmers consumed their seeds during the crisis, while others lost locally adapted varieties due to displacement and emergency seed distribution. Relief seed often arrived poorly suited to local agroecological conditions. The famine exposed a profound institutional question for Ethiopia’s genebank scientists. What is the purpose of conserving seeds if farming communities cannot recover when their seed systems collapse?

Under the leadership of scientists such as Melaku Worede and colleagues, Ethiopia responded differently from much of the world. Through the Seeds of Survival program supported by USC Canada (now SeedChange), local varieties were multiplied and returned to communities. Community seed banks were established. Farmers and scientists worked together to conserve, select, and restore lost crops.

At a time when agricultural modernization favored uniform varieties and centralized breeding, Ethiopia argued that diversity itself was a form of resilience. Farmers’ knowledge was treated not as a backward tradition, but as science built through generations of experimentation. In those years, Ethiopia was not simply following global debates on biodiversity and conservation. It was helping lead them.

EBI also helped restore farmers to global discussions about seeds and biodiversity. For much of the twentieth century, farmers in centers of crop diversity remained largely invisible in agricultural science and policy. Scientists collected from them, breeders used their materials, and institutions stored the seeds. But the communities that had maintained crop diversity over generations were rarely recognized as innovators.

Ethiopian scientists challenged that arrangement. Figures such as Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher and Melaku Worede helped make Ethiopia an influential voice in debates around biodiversity governance, biosafety, intellectual property rights, genetically modified organisms, and farmers’ rights. That legacy still matters today. But the world around EBI is changing rapidly.

The challenge is no longer only about seeds physically crossing borders. Genetic information now moves rapidly through genome sequencing, bioinformatics, digital sequence information systems, and artificial intelligence-assisted breeding. Biodiversity governance increasingly involves data, technology, finance, and international negotiation.

This creates a difficult reality for countries like Ethiopia. Protection alone is no longer enough. A genebank built mainly around restrictive control risks, protecting yesterday’s system while innovation and influence move elsewhere. That is why the next phase of EBI’s history will require more than conservation alone.

The institute must remain a guardian of Ethiopia’s biodiversity. But it must also become a stronger research partner, negotiator, knowledge hub, and regional leader. It needs expertise not only in conservation science but also in digital sequence information negotiations, biodiversity finance, genomic characterization, data systems, policy analysis, partnership building, and international collaboration.

The world still sees Ethiopian genetic resources as critically important for climate adaptation and future food security. But global interest alone does not create national benefit. Countries need institutions capable of negotiating partnerships, mobilizing funding, shaping research agendas, and participating actively in scientific networks. Without institutional capacity, sovereignty risks becoming isolation.

There is also a more immediate challenge. EBI’s collections themselves must remain alive, viable, and secure. Genebank conservation is not achieved simply by placing seeds in cold rooms. Collections require continuous regeneration, viability monitoring, characterization, documentation, and safety duplication. Genetic erosion can happen inside genebanks when collections are poorly maintained or inadequately regenerated.

That is precisely why facilities such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault exist. The Seed Vault operates as a global safety-duplication facility in which countries retain ownership and control over their materials while securing backup copies under long-term conservation conditions in a black-box arrangement. Safety duplication is not a surrender of sovereignty. It is protection against war, infrastructure failure, natural disasters, and future uncertainty.

The same need for renewal applies to community seed banks. Ethiopia helped inspire the global community seed bank movement, but many early seed banks now appear fragile or dependent on external funding. Community seed banks were never meant to become symbolic storage rooms visited during workshops. They were designed to strengthen local seed security, restore lost varieties, and support adaptation to climate stress. The next generation will need stronger national support, farmer leadership, and integration into broader seed and development systems.

A golden jubilee should therefore be more than a ceremony of speeches and self-congratulations. It should be a moment for reflection.

What kind of biodiversity institution does Ethiopia need for the next fifty years? Can EBI once again become a regional center for conservation science, farmers’ seed systems, and biodiversity governance in Africa? Can it help train a new generation of conservation scientists, plant genetic resource experts, biodiversity negotiators, and genomic resource managers? Can it protect Ethiopia’s genetic resources while participating more confidently in international scientific collaboration and global policy processes? Can it place farmers back at the center of conservation, not as symbols at conferences, but as collaborators in breeding, adaptation, seed systems, and fair benefit-sharing?

The founders of this institution were not managers, just protecting a routine bureaucracy. They challenged dominant models of agricultural modernization, questioned narrow approaches to seed system development, and pushed the world to rethink how biodiversity governance should recognize farmers, local knowledge, and centers of crop diversity. At a time when smallholder farmers were rarely treated as scientific actors, they insisted that farmers were breeders, innovators, and custodians of genetic resources. They built institutions, scientific collections, and global influence under conditions of famine, political instability, war, and severe resource constraints.

To honor that generation is not simply to repeat its language. It is to recover its courage. For fifty years, EBI has conserved seeds, knowledge, and possibilities that matter not only to Ethiopia but to the future of global agriculture itself. But institutions, like seeds, cannot remain viable without renewal.

The seeds are still alive. The question is whether the institution can renew itself with the same determination that once saved those seeds.

With such reflections throughout this article, I would like to sincerely congratulate the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute on its golden jubilee for fifty years of conserving Ethiopia’s plant genetic resources and biodiversity, advancing farmers’ roles in conservation and seed systems, and helping shape global debates on biodiversity governance, farmers’ rights, and food security.

Teshome Hunduma (PhD) is a senior advisor on nature and biodiversity, and on sustainable food systems, at the Norwegian Forum for Development and Environment. He can be reached at thunduma@gmail.com. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

Contributed by Teshome Hunduma Mulesa (PhD)