Almost 50,000 seeds are today being ferried to a global vault in a mountain, on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. The shipment, part of an effort to secure food diversity for future generations, includes donations from Syria’s own seed bank just two years after it had to make a withdrawal from the Svalbard vault to help it keep up with its Middle East agricultural breeding programme in the midst of civil war. Read more: The 'Doomsday' seed vault is getting a redesign after climate change caused it to flood
“[It] shows that despite political and economic differences in other areas, collective efforts to conserve crop diversity and produce a global food supply for tomorrow continue to be strong,” Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, which helped with the shipment, said. She added that the countries making the deposit - Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, the US, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and the UK - collectively account for a quarter of the world’s population, demonstrating how the global community is in agreement on the need for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. “Crop diversity is a fundamental foundation for the end of hunger.”
The vault can hold up to 4.5 million varieties of crop, with 500 seeds from each variety being stored. This amounts to a capacity of 2.5 billion seeds. It is designed to withstand trauma from bombs and natural disasters, protecting its goods for up to 100 years from the time of deposit. It works as a kind of "external backup" of the seed banks that already exist across the globe, like Syria’s International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).
Individual banks store as diverse a collection of seeds native to their region as possible, but then send duplicates to Svalbard. ICARDA, which moved from Aleppo to Beirut in 2012 as a result of civil war, requested a withdrawal of 130 boxes of seeds in 2015 - it had originally deposited 325, containing 116,000 samples. It is now returning some of those seeds.
“We are demonstrating today that we can rely on our genebanks and their safety duplications, despite adverse circumstances, so we can get one step closer to a food secure world,” Aly Abousabaa, director general of ICARDA, said in the same statement. Read more: Infoporn: the biggest threats putting the world's plants in peril
The Global Seed Vault was created in 2008 and is located 800 miles from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. It preserves the genetic data of seeds that are also stored in 1,700 banks across the world, and its current tally after today’s shipment will hit 930,821. These local deposits can be accessed readily, whereas Svalbard supplies should only be requested as the last solution in the event of natural or human disasters.
It was set up in the wake of a number of disasters that made the need for a secure facility urgent: "War in Rwanda, Burundi, the Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan has destroyed seed collections - and the Pavlos station in St Petersburg, Russia's biggest field collection, is threatened by property developers," Cary Fowler, then executive director at the Global Crop Diversity Trust told WIRED in 2010.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
