CAMDEN, Maine -- "We're losing books that not only haven't we read, but we haven't even opened."
So says biodiversity specialist Cary Fowler. These volumes -- written only using the letters C, T, A, and G -- are breeds and crossbreeds of plants that form the core of the world's crops. Fowler, addressing the PopTech conference today, is leading the effort to do something about this problem.
His NGO, the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, is now in the process of building a freezer, a really really big freezer.
As briefly discussed and diagrammed by Wired in May, the GCDT's Svalbard Global Seed Vault is now being built -- financed partly by the Norwegian government and the Gates Foundation -- less than 700 miles from the North Pole.
Like a Bond villain's hideout -- albeit a bizarro-world villain committed to acts of extreme altruism -- the Vault built to hold literally millions of seed samples is now being drilled into a sandstone mountain. This arctic deep freeze will, Fowler said, serve as "a safety backup for the world's (1,400) seed banks."
[Closeup of mural painted by Peter Durand]
Even such a seemingly simple plant as rice, he said, has an astonishing 120,000 distinct genetic variations. (Each is "as different as a beagle is from a great dane," he said.)
"If we're going to cope with (climate change)," Fowler said, "We're going to need to modify the crops. We need the diversity to do it."
Fowler said even today's toxic crops could be tomorrow's staples. The grasspea (Lathyrus sativus), for instance, is a legume that is also one of the most drought-resilient crops in the world. "When other crops die, grasspea continues," he said.
The most prevalent breeds of grasspea today, however, also contain small amounts of a neurotoxin that ultimately paralyzes its consumers.
On the other hand, Fowler said, "There are low-toxin varieties of lathyrus. It points out why it's so important that we conserve all the diversity, so that we can begin to breed varieties of crops such as lathyrus for poor people and indeed for ourselves."
