Papua New Guinea has major ex situ field collections of plant genetic material in its staple food crops (aibika, banana, cassava, sweet potato, taro, yams). With limited germplasm conservation resources available, difficult choices must be made as to which plants to maintain. The objective of this study is to provide a better basis for evaluating the efficient allocation of resources to plant germplasm conservation of food staples in PNG. Tools that could be employed to determine an efficient allocation include cost budgeting (through spreadsheets), and linear or dynamic programming. Cost budgets were developed to estimate the total cost of maintaining current sweet potato, taro, banana and aibika germplasm collections. Budgets are integrated through the key variables to produce a master spreadsheet. Key variables including (i) the number of accessions, (ii) the number of plants per accession, (iii) the planting density or (iv) the length of the reproduction cycle may be adjusted to investigate the effects on total costs of alternative strategies for maintaining collections. It is also planned to use linear and dynamic programming to identify the optimal allocation of resources subject to given constraints.