By Dolly Aglay

MANILA, March 12 (Reuters) - After the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, farmers around the region relied on stockpiles from a Philippine-based rice institute to provide them with rice varieties that could grow in salty soils.

Countries like Cambodia, East Timor, India, Nepal and the Philippines have also turned to the genebank of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to restore native rice varieties that have disappeared for a variety of reasons.

IRRI and the Global Crop Diversity Trust announced on Monday an agreement to secure the world's largest repository of rice, the staple food of about three billion people or around half the world's population.

Under the agreement, the IRRI has pledged to invest $400,000 annually in the gene bank and the Trust $200,000, both parties said in a joint statement.

The Trust, set up by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and research group Bioversity International, said the agreement would allow for inflationary increases and would remain in force indefinitely.

The grant would be used to buy any rice varieties not currently in the genebank and to upgrade storage systems for long-term conservation.

LAST LINE OF DEFENCE

IRRI's genetic resource centre at its headquarters in the foothills of Mount Makiling in Los Banos, south of Manila, houses some 100,000 samples of rice from Asia to Africa.

The collection, kept in a special earthquake and fire-proof facility that must be maintained at temperatures as low as minus 19 degrees Celsius, provides the last line of defence in times of war, natural disasters and attacks from pests and diseases.

"With almost half the world's population depending on rice, we wanted to make sure IRRI's genebank was insulated from the whims of fluctuating funding," Cary Fowler, executive director of Global Crop Diversity Trust, said in a statement.

"The agreement goes to the core of the Trust's mission, which is to guarantee the conservation of the world's crop diversity, and it's hard to imagine a more important crop for sustaining humanity than rice," he added.

The Trust is also supporting Norway's plan to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island this year that will eventually contain every known crop variety.

"The rice genebank is not just a scientific exercise in seed genetics, but a major hedge against disaster that ensures farmers throughout the world will always have the rice varieties they need to maintain food security," Robert Zeigler, IRRI's director general, said in a statement.

He said an independent study estimated that adding an additional 1,000 rice samples to IRRI's genebank would generate an annual stream of benefits to poor farmers of $325 million.

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