JOHANNESBURG --- The United Nations and agricultural scientists from around the world launched a new organization at the earth summit, aiming to raise 260 million dollars to preserve the genetic diversity of the planet's plant life.

The global conservation trust was launched by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and 16 centers of the consultative group on international agricultural research.

The fund will provide the financial backing to expand gene banks where collections of seed or growing plants are stored as living libraries of genetic information.

"When it comes to plant and genetic resources, the peoples of the world are utterly interdependent," said Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of the International Plant Genetic Resource Institute in Rome.

"A true globalism is part of the heritage of modern crops and the economies based on them," he said.

Crop diversity collections consisting of 5.4 million samples from around the planet are being held by these banks in more than 150 countries, the trust said in a statement released at the summit.

Gene banks are "widely recognized as an important remaining sanctuary for crop genetic diversity" which can be used to restore agriculture in countries devastated by war or disasters, it said.

More importantly, they support the development of new strains of crops and because of that, scientists say, hold the key to varieties that can outpace human hunger.

However experts say that many of the world's 1,470 gene bank collections, subject to the vagaries of government financing, are in a precarious state, the SAPA news agency reported.

A new report by the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Imperial College in London said some 28 percent of developing countries had cut their gene bank budgets since 1996, AFP reported.

On the south Pacific island of Fiji, problems with ailing cooling equipment in 2001 caused the loss of 212 rice samples.

In addition, said the report, though gene banks were acquiring more and more material, even some of the world's richest nations were falling behind in the periodic regeneration -- growing out the seeds -- needed to maintain their stocks.

The need for the banks, it said, was illustrated by the extinction of one wild species of coffee, the threat to 10 others, and the almost total loss of the hard wheat variety used for bread in the Roman Empire. Said Hawtin: "The problems are immediate. We are losing varieties, we are losing genetic plant diversity by the day. There has never been a better time to move on this issue than now."

Countries sponsoring the trust include Switzerland, which has given 10.2 million dollars and Egypt, with 250,000 dollars. The United Nations donated 500,000 dollars.