The Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is an international nonprofit organization with a secretariat in Bonn, Germany. Its mission is to conserve and make available the world's crop diversity for food security.

Established in 2004, the Crop Trust is the only organization whose sole mission is to safeguard the world’s crop diversity for future food security. Through an endowment fund for crop diversity, the Crop Trust provides financial support for key international and national genebanks that hold collections of diversity for food crops available under the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). The organization also provides tools and support for the efficient management of genebanks, facilitates coordination between conserving institutions, and organizes final backup of crop seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Since its establishment, the Crop Trust has raised more than USD 300 million for the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund and supports conservation work in over 80 countries.

Crop diversity is the biological foundation of agriculture, and is the raw material plant breeders and farmers use to adapt crop varieties to pests and diseases. In the future, this crop diversity will play a central role in helping agriculture adjust to climate change and adapt to water and energy constraints.

In 1996, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recognized the need for global coordination for the conservation of the world’s crop diversity. At a conference organized by the FAO, 150 countries launched a Global Plan of Action to coordinate efforts at halting the loss of the world’s agrobiodiversity. The Global Plan of Action formed a major pillar of what would become the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, known as the Plant Treaty. The Plant Treaty brings the diversity of 64 food and forage crops into a multilateral system where the genetic material is protected and accessible to all who needed it. To protect the collections that housed that genetic material, however, a stable system of funding was needed.

To partly address this need, the Crop Trust was established in October 2004. Its mission was to help build a global system of ex situ crop diversity conservation, funded through an endowment for crop diversity. The Plant Treaty recognizes the endowment fund as an essential element of its funding strategy and confirms the autonomy of the Crop Trust as a scientific organization in raising and disbursing funds. Geoff Hawtin was appointed the Interim Executive Director of the new organization, housed at the FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy.

The Crop Trust began its work gathering contributions for the endowment fund from various foundations, corporations, and governments that had ratified the Plant Treaty. In 2007, the Crop Trust signed its first long-term grant agreement with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines.

In 2005, Cary Fowler was appointed the first permanent Crop Trust Executive Director. Under Fowler’s leadership, the Crop Trust initiated the Global System Project and joined the three-party management agreement for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 as a partnership between the Crop Trust, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of Norway, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen). In 2011, the Crop Trust launched the Crop Wild Relatives Project, a 10-year project to collect and conserve crop wild relatives, a project funded by the Government of Norway.