This chapter explores the changing epistemologies and scientific practices of crop diversity conservation from the perspective of key institutional players: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the 1960s and CGIAR since the 1970s. The spread of “modern” high-yielding varieties during the Green Revolution was thought to have induced a process of “genetic erosion” that would wipe out farmers’ varieties in the Global South. This view highlighted the power of the Green Revolution as a homogenizing force as well as a modernizing one and shaped the management of crop diversity. Genetic resources were seen as scattered raw materials concentrated in the Global South, which only scientific specialists could preserve and transform into something valuable as modern varieties. With this framework as its guide, CGIAR led the development of a global gene bank network for more than fifty years. It coordinated collection campaigns and conservation efforts and facilitated breeders’ access to gene bank materials. This chapter traces the historical trajectory of these efforts, analyzing competing rationales that structured dominant and marginalized views on crop diversity conservation.

Historically, the use of legal frameworks to claim proprietary rights in the products of agricultural science was limited to the private sector. Public institutions, including CGIAR, treated their creations as the common heritage of humankind. Scientific, economic, and legal changes unsettled this public–private balance in the 1980s, provoking a reimagination of the role of intellectual property in research and development. Three distinct theories about how CGIAR should respond to the global expansion of intellectual property in agriculture emerged. Maximalists embraced proprietary legal claims, adaptationists advocated for cautious accommodation, and rejectionists viewed intellectual property as ancillary to the CGIAR mission. This chapter traces the history of intellectual property debates within CGIAR from 1990 to 2020, arguing that over time, the adaptationist approach prevailed as institutional governance structures developed. Although current policies permit each CGIAR center to embrace rejectionism or maximalism to a certain extent, the rejectionist theory has been marginalized at the system level, while a global capitalist approach to agricultural science has taken root.

The circulation of data ranked high among the objectives adopted by CGIAR at its founding in 1971. This chapter considers how agricultural experts attempted to realize a desired “full exchange of information” among scientists working at geographically distant sites, in different languages and cultural contexts, with different organisms and research interests from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The chapter focuses on the historical development of “crop descriptors,” today defined as providing an “international format and a universally understood language for plant genetic resources data.” Developers of descriptors aspire to agree on traits and terms that will allow users from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to and extract information from an integrated data infrastructure. The chapter examines crop descriptors as a critical component of CGIAR’s earliest efforts to create “system-wide” research tools and agendas, emphasizing the scientific and political agendas that shaped this top-down systematizing work, finding that it provided an opportunity for CGIAR to instantiate and consolidate its central position in a web of international development initiatives.