Curan Bonham has an extensive background in forest conservation and sustainable forestry management spanning across North, Central and South America. He is a former Fulbright Scholar (Chile) and worked for 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala helping Mayan communities establish agroforestry and ecotourism projects that enabled diverse, sustainable and profitable livelihoods in the region of Alta Verapaz.

His two-year research fellowship with Bioversity focused on trying to understand how Indian farmers and plant breeders access germplasm collections in genebanks, and how those relationships could be improved and strengthened. Working with India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources and ICRISAT, a CGIAR center based in Hyderabad; his first year concentrated on finding ways to create more dialogue between pearl millet farmers and gene banks in Rajasthan, India. The aim of the research project, was to establish relationships that would assist plant breeders in creating seeds that made sense for farmers and their circumstances, thereby providing a more effective form of support than before.

The second year of his fellowship was based in Bioversity’s Rome Headquarters, linking the data he had collected in Rajasthan to mechanisms and policy options that could be implemented by the National Government of India as well as the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). There are currently a number of technical, administrative, and political considerations that affect direct release of germplasm for cultivation, creating a significant gap between farmers and genebanks, and more importantly negatively affecting the productivity potential and food security of small scale farmers.

Curan is currently the Intervention Monitoring & Evaluation Manager for the Verde Ventures Fund at Conservation International.