Crop wild relatives with Ruth Eastwood of Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank

Interview with Dr. Ruth Eastwood, the Crop Wild Relative Project Co-ordinator at the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Climate change is predicted to cause the substantial decline of agricultural production in the coming decades, and together with rising food prices, this will hit the poorest first and hardest. This global analysis forms part of a larger partnership to collect and conserve the wild relatives of the world's major food crops. The initiative, led by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust) in partnership with Kew's Millennium Seed Bank and in collaboration with national and international agricultural research institutes, is the largest ever global effort to conserve crop wild relatives. These wild plants contain essential traits that could be bred into crops to make them more hardy and versatile in the face of dramatically different climates expected in the coming years. The Norwegian government is providing funding for this ten-year initiative.