The Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture has recently launched CAPFITOGEN, an initiative aimed at strengthening technical capacity of national programs and developing information and analysis tools for plant genetic resources.
The tools being developed by CAPFITOGEN represent an effort to bring scientific and technological advances for conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources to regional and national levels. These tools are designed to assist countries that are rich in plant genetic resources but have limited economic resources, so that they may take advantage of different information sources and open access databases to aid in their conservation and decision-making processes.
Each CAPFITOGEN tool is designed to increase efficiency by simplifying certain tasks that, until now, were complex and required expert knowledge of complex computer programming languages. CAPFITOGEN is being funded by the Government of Spain, and its core activities are being carried out in partnership with, inter alia, the National Plant Genetic Resources Centre of the Spanish National Institute for Agriculture and Food Research and Technology (CRF-INIA), the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the King Juan Carlos University and the National University of Colombia.
The first set of pilot tools was delivered in a technical workshop organized by the Treaty Secretariat for Latin America and the Caribbean which took place in Bogota, Colombia, from 19 to 22 March 2013. The workshop promoted the voluntary use and adoption of several data management tools, developed in open-source code and adapted to the needs of the national programs of the Latin America Region. It also gathered information on needs to further develop new tools and adapt existing ones within the framework of the Global Information System on Plant Genetic Resources referred to in Article 17 of the International Treaty, which is very much in line with the philosophy of the CIARD RING. The workshop contributed to improve skills and capacity of the technical staff of the Latin America and the Caribbean region.
CAPFITOGEN tools reach a wide variety of end users, including technical staff of national programs and institutions involved in the conservation of plant genetic resources, through various training and capacity building activities such as face-to-face workshops and online support. The entire catalogue of tools is available online on the Treaty’s Website.