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NEWS POST: ‘Doomsday Vault’
Request: Scientists Seek Over 100,000 Seed Samples From Arctic Bank For Middle
East
A
Lebanon-based seed bank formerly located in war-torn Syria has requested
116,000 crop samples from an international “doomsday vault” in Svalbard to
re-establish the collection elsewhere. It is the first such request since the
facility opened in 2008.
Forced
from its research farm in Aleppo in 2012, the International Centre for
Agricultural Research in Dry Areas’ (ICARDA), which provides seed stock for dry
Middle Eastern countries, wants almost 130 boxes of seed samples out of the 325
it had deposited in the vault in recent years.
“The
gene bank wants use to send some of the seeds back this autumn, to grow and
harvest them. Then they want to send the new seeds up here again as a back-up,”
Norway’s agriculture minister, Sylvi Listhaug, told VG newspaper. “They
will be sent to other countries in the Middle East, since Syria is still
affected by war, but for security reasons we will not say where.”
While
the Norwegian minister has opted not to disclose the location to which the
seeds are to be sent, the creator of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Professor Cary
Fowler, said in August that the center would reestablish its stocks in Morocco
and Lebanon.
“[This
centre] had one of the biggest and best collections of wheat, barley,
chickpeas, lentils,” Fowler told Australia’s ABC News at the time. “It’s on the
outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, and Aleppo is in deep trouble right now, with a
huge amount of fighting going on. We don’t think that seed collection has been
lost, as is, right there in Aleppo, but that could come any day now.”
After
Aleppo fell to rebels in 2012, the center’s staff was forced to relocate to
Beirut, where its headquarters are still based.
It
is estimated that up to 87 percent of the Syria-grown seeds is now safely
stored in a vault deep inside a mountain – the world’s largest facility of its
kind – on Svalbard, a Norwegian island 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the
North Pole.
According
to Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, the samples
will be sent once paperwork is completed, Reuters reported.
This
is the first such “return-to-sender” mission in the Middle East since the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault was launched in 2008. Since then it has collected
860,000 seed samples from gene banks from across the world, including North
Korea and Iraq.
“This
shows why it is so important to have a global seed bank like this, as a back-up
when things occur in the world, and when there is a risk that important germs
may be lost,” Listhaug told VG newspaper.
The seed vault in Svalbard
is meant to ensure world food security and biodiversity in case of natural
disasters, climate change, and particularly nuclear wars.
The Doomsday Vault: The Seeds That
Could Save A Post-Apocalyptic World
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| View from the top of the Vault at night (Photo: Sipa Press/REX_Shutterstock; Image source: The Guardian UK) |
Set in an Arctic mountainside, the Svalbard seed
bank contains the world’s most prized crops. But a row has erupted over whether
this is the best hope of feeding the world after a catastrophe or just an
overpriced deep freeze
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Cary
Fowler, the Crop Trust’s senior adviser, at the Svalbard vault. (Photo: Sipa
Press/REX_Shutterstock; Image source: The Guardian UK)
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One
Tuesday last winter, in the town nearest to the North Pole, Robert Bjerke
turned up for work at his regular hour and looked at the computer monitor on his
desk to discover, or so it seemed for a few horrible moments, that the future
of human civilisation was in jeopardy.
The
morning of 16 December 2014 was relatively mild for winter in Svalbard: -7.6C
with moderate winds. The archipelago, which lies in the Arctic ocean, is under
Norway’s control, but it is nearly twice as far from Oslo as it is from the
North Pole. The main town, Longyearbyen, has many unexpected comforts –
tax-free liquor and cigarettes, clothing stores and a cafe with artisan
chocolates shaped like polar bears and snowflakes. For Bjerke, who works for
the Norwegian government’s property agency, Statsbygg, the cold and isolation
were the big attraction when he moved there. Bjerke loved the stillness, and
getting out into that big white Arctic wasteland on his snowmobile; so much so
that he signed on for a second posting at Svalbard a decade or more after his
first stint. But when Bjerke arrived at the office, he was looking forward to
spending Christmas with his wife and three children near Oslo.
Statsbygg’s
green industrial-style building sits on a hill overlooking the town and the
inky blue waters of a fjord. It is a stunning view, but that day, the monitor
commanded Bjerke’s attention. In the most important property under his care –
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – the temperature reading was off. The vault was
too warm.
Since
2008, the Svalbard seed vault and its guardians have been entrusted by the
world’s governments with the safekeeping of the most prized varieties of crops
on which human civilization was raised. That morning, it contained the seeds of
nearly 4,000 plant species – more than 720,000 individual plastic-sheathed
samples. The site was built to be disaster-proof: 130 metres up the mountain in
case of sea-level rise, earthquake resistant, and with a natural insulation of
permafrost to ensure the contents were kept frozen for decades to come.
About
60% of Svalbard is glacial. There exist no signs that it was settled by humans
before whalers and hunters built small communities along the coast, and coal
was found. Nothing grows there apart from wildflowers and grass. But in the
early 1980s, Nordic countries began using an abandoned mine shaft, down the
hill from the vault, as a safe house for seeds. At a time when industrial-scale
farming was perceived as a threat to crop diversity, it was the first experiment
in using the permafrost as cold storage for seeds.
When
governments began to talk about the danger to crops from climate change, Norway
emerged as one of the only places still trusted by both developing and
industrialised countries: if there was to be an agreement on founding a safe
house for seeds, Norway was the logical place. Governments from Washington to
Pyongyang agreed to deposit back-up copies of their most precious plant
resources in Svalbard. The late Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel laureate
Wangari Maathai
made the first deposit, a box of rice seeds, in February 2008. On arrival at
the vault, the seeds were plunged to a temperature of -18C, frozen in time
against drought, pestilence, war, disease, and the slow-moving disaster of
climate change.
For
plant scientists and farmers to breed the traits that can resist higher
temperatures and long-term droughts, they need access to genetic diversity. In
the event of a cataclysmic crop failure – for example, from a virulent new
disease – and if all other samples of a given crop were destroyed, the world
could count on the collection at Svalbard to provide the source material for
the breeding of new varieties. The explicit promise of the Crop Trust, the international foundation
behind the vault, was that the seeds at Svalbard would endure for ever, a
lifeline in an uncertain future.
As
the man tasked with monitoring the vault, Bjerke feels the weight of that
responsibility every day. He constantly checks the temperature, humidity, and
other conditions inside the vault. “I have it on the screen all day,” he told
me. “Some days I am up there two or three times.”
On
16 December, the temperature was a full 2C above the -18C established as the
optimal temperature for ensuring the vault’s contents would remain viable. The
surrounding permafrost would keep the temperature from rising above -6C, possibly
for months, but malfunctions were never supposed to happen at Svalbard. “I had
to find a solution,” he said.
Bjerke
got in his truck and drove up the winding road to the vault, scraped aside the
ice crystals on the steel door and let himself in. The vault is usually left
unmanned. It did not take long to discover the problem: an electrical
connection in the refrigeration unit had rusted away – it was covered with
golfball-sized chunks of ice. The entire cooling system had shut down. There
was no back-up. Bjerke arranged for a technician to fly out the next day from
Tromso, about 950km away. By that time the temperature in the vault was up to
-14.5C.
The
technician arrived, quickly confirmed the diagnosis, and found the part of the
cooling system that needed to be replaced. He broke it to Bjerke that the
parts, which were made in Italy, would not be available until after Christmas.
But the same technician also serviced the local supermarket in Longyearbyen and
knew its freezer had a similar component. He arranged to borrow the part, as a
temporary fix. “He put that part into this freezer unit, and started it, and it
has gone ever since,” Bjerke said.
Seed
banks are vulnerable to near-misses and mishaps. That was the whole point of
locating a disaster-proof back-up vault at Svalbard. But what if there was a
bigger glitch – one that could not be fixed by borrowing a part from the local
shop? There is now a growing body of opinion that the world’s faith, in
Svalbard and the Crop Trust’s broader mission to create seed banks, is
misplaced. Those who have worked with farmers in the field, especially in
developing countries, which contain by far the greatest variety of plants, say
that diversity cannot be boxed up and saved in a single container – no matter
how secure it may be. Crops are always changing, pests and diseases are always
adapting, and global warming will bring additional challenges that remain as
yet unforeseen. In a perfect world, the solution would be as diverse and
dynamic as plant life itself.
*
* *
On
26 February, the early morning light turned the snow on the lower slopes of the
hills across the fjord from Longyearbyen to a blush pink. The town’s 2,000
residents started to think of spring, although the sun would not shine directly
on their homes until 8 March. That morning, three government ministers from
Denmark, Norway and Sweden arrived to visit the seed vault. All three had been
recently appointed and this was their first visit. They were accompanied by
Marie Haga, the executive director of the Crop Trust, who exudes the high
wattage personality of her former career as a Green party leader in Norway. By the time their
bus pulled up in front of a massive concrete portal jutting out of the snow,
the moon was already high, and a fibre-optic display above the entrance lit up
in an eerie blue-green glow against the night sky.
It
looked like a Bond villain’s lair. The three officials, Norway’s food and
agriculture minister, Sylvi Listhaug, Sweden’s countryside minister, Sven-Erik
Bucht, and Denmark’s food minister, Dan Jørgensen, zipped into identical blue
and black snow suits and stepped over a short steel gangway into a tunnel
reinforced with corrugated steel. A rack of crampons hung near the entrance – a
precaution against slipping, since leaks in the vault can swiftly turn to ice.
The officials, chatting with one another, followed the tunnel downhill for
about 120 metres until it opened out into a large white hallway with three sets
of double steel doors. Aides clomped behind carrying six large black plastic
storage boxes. It was a symbolic occasion – if not a particularly solemn one –
marking the first step towards the preservation of natural forests. The boxes
contained thousands of seeds collected from Norway spruces and Scots pines that
grow in forests in Norway and Finland. One of the samples came from a tree that
dated back to 1938. The ministers took the boxes and entered the vault alone.
They came out empty-handed a few minutes later, mission complete.
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The
temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is kept at -18C. (Photo: John
McConnico/AP; Image source: The Guardian UK)
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From
the inside, the vault looks like a boiler room or warehouse – a forgotten
corner of a government building, with its bare walls and utilitarian metal
shelving. It was chilled to -18C. At this temperature, fingers cramp almost
instantly, and batteries in mobile phones shut down in minutes. In a room the
size of a tennis court, 10 rows of warehouse shelving, labelled alphabetically,
are loaded with storage boxes, 12 to a shelf. The boxes are stacked as they
arrive – North Korea’s rough wooden crates sit next door to deposits from the
US, Russia’s contributions on top of Ukraine’s. The critical data about the
seeds, their genetic sequencing and traits, is kept off site.
North
Korea’s rough wooden crates sit next door to deposits from the US, Russia’s
contributions on top of Ukraine’s
With
its exalted mission and its eternal ambitions, Haga likens the atmosphere
inside the vault to that of a cathedral. After dozens of visits over the years,
Cary Fowler, the original director and now senior adviser to the Crop Trust, is
more down to earth. “If you look at it, it’s a pretty simple facility. It’s a
big tunnel,” he said.
For
the last two years, Haga and Fowler have performed as a double act, promoting
the Crop Trust’s mission. Haga, a relentlessly upbeat former diplomat and
politician, has leveraged her network of contacts to bring in big funders and
media attention. Fowler, a soft-spoken scientist from Tennessee, has been the
guiding force behind the vault since it was just a germ of an idea. Among the
small and closely connected circles of scientists and bureaucrats who are
involved with efforts to save crop diversity, there is enormous respect for
Fowler. His background is agriculture, and his reputation for working with
farmers has helped insulate the Crop Trust against those who suspect the
enterprise is part of a secret plot by agribusiness to gain control of heirloom
seeds.
“If
you ask me: is there anything bad that could happen at Svalbard? Is there any
way it can be destroyed? There are no guarantees in this world,” Fowler said.
“People say, ‘What if an atomic bomb dropped on top of the mountain?’ And I
think that would probably do it.”
Fowler,
now 69, came of age in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements; his
first job in agriculture was with an NGO. From the 1990s, he was at the centre
of efforts to persuade governments and institutions of the importance of
protecting crop diversity – and then securing an international agreement that
would actually do it. He eventually grew frustrated by the grinding pace of
United Nations negotiations and the “poisonous” politics that engulfed them.
Instead, he invested his energies in finding a safe place for seeds – a back-up
to the seed banks across the developing world, especially those whose
collections were endangered by natural disasters or war. When the Crop Trust
was founded, Fowler took the helm.
The
morning after the ministers’ visit, as the sun came up over the open waters of
the fjord, Fowler joined officials from the Nordic Genetic Resource Center
(NordGen) at Longyearbyen’s airport to process an even bigger delivery. It
comprised 58 boxes, containing 20,000 specimens from the US Department of Agriculture
(USDA), the Africa Rice Centre,
and Seed Savers Exchange – Fowler’s
old organization – which collects and shares seeds among farmers and other
growers. The vault is generally opened up only three times a year for deposits
and a limited number of people are allowed inside at one time. Before leaving
the airport, Fowler and the NordGen officials ran the boxes through the airport
x-ray machine, but security staff were not permitted to open them or look
inside. One of the long list of conditions for deposits to the vault stipulates
that only the original depositor will ever have access to their contribution.
(This stipulation was made in order to satisfy nations that feared big biotech
companies would steal their heirloom crops.)
Once
at the vault, Fowler and the others slapped barcode labels on the boxes and
trooped in to shelve them. With the latest deposits – soybeans, barley,
lentils, sorghum and wheat from the USDA and rice from Africa – the vault now
contains 865,000 different samples. Most are from a few core species – the
focus is on conserving 25 staple crops, such as corn, wheat, rice and legumes.
There are nearly 160,000 samples of wheat, and approaching 150,000 samples of
rice.
Almost
every country in the world has deposited seeds – with some notable exceptions.
Japan and China have yet to join in. India remains wary and, Fowler said, there
are not enough specimens of green leafy vegetables, which are important staples
in Africa. Italy has deposited only two samples, both of the maize used to make
polenta, and there has been a drop-off in deposits from developing countries in
the last two years, since the vault stopped paying for shipping.
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STABLER
WITH SEEDS : Coordinator of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault , Åsmund Asdal ,
front cardboard boxes with seed from Syria , which could ensure food for future
generations in the war-torn country. (Photo: Terje Mortensen, VG)
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At
the other extreme, there has been the difficult matter of turning away potential
deposits because they duplicated existing material. Some national seed banks
have had to be told that their prized variety was surplus to requirements, and
that a neighbouring country, possibly a rival, had got their deposit in first.
Some crops cannot be stored in Svalbard, because they require different
conditions. There are no bananas, apples, cassavas or tubers. But by Fowler’s
count, the collection covers about half of the world’s known crop diversity,
which he estimates at about 1.4m plant varieties. The first chamber is already
starting to fill up, with space remaining for 750 boxes, if the trust adds new
storage units. Operations are already under way to cool down one of the
adjacent chambers. When the steel doors first swung open in February 2008,
Fowler would have been happy with 300,000 specimens.
“I did not expect it to go this fast, and I
did not think that we would seriously be contemplating the need to open up that
second room in the near to medium future,” he said.
*
* *
Our
ability to feed a global population projected to reach 11 billion by 2100 is
under increasing threat from hotter, drier seasons, wild swings from drought to
flood, and new diseases. Staples such as wheat and corn are likely to be among
the most vulnerable to wild weather, pests and disease. In the 1960s and 1970s
farmers began to abandon their traditional seeds and take up new hybridized
varieties, which promised bigger yields. Seeds that had been locally developed
over centuries disappeared without a trace. China, for example, is believed to
have lost 90% of its rice varieties. In the early 1900s, US seed catalogues
offered more than 400 varieties of peas – now almost all of the US commercial
crop is grown from just two. Many of the wild relatives of crops – species that
could possess important traits of resistance to diseases or pests – are also
becoming extinct. There are farmers in the American midwest who still remember
the fungus that wiped out a quarter of the US corn crop in the 1970s. In the
last few months, a devastating mutation of wheat rust has wiped out crops
across Africa. These epidemics might have been stopped in the early stages if
farmers were planting different varieties of crops.
With
the advent of global warming, farmers needed diversity more than ever because
it was unclear what varieties would flourish in unfamiliar conditions. But
national seed collections, and the 15 international seed banks, have struggled
for survival. The Iraqi seed vault, which was located near the notorious prison
of Abu Ghraib, was looted and destroyed in the chaos that followed the US
invasion of 2003. The guardians of Afghanistan’s seed banks hid some of their
samples before fleeing the Taliban takeover in the 1990s, but when they
returned they found that the boxes had been looted, and the seeds scattered on
the ground. The Philippine gene bank burnt down in 2012, six years after it was
wrecked by a flood. Egypt’s catalogue of desert seeds, held in the northern
Sinai, was ransacked by looters during the 2011 uprisings. There were some
daring rescues: materials from the seed bank in the city of Aleppo were
smuggled out in batches by workers and commercial courier services a few weeks
before the Syrian war reached its walls. Back-ups to that collection are now
shelved at Svalbard.
The
greatest destruction, however, has been wrought by budget cuts and
mismanagement at seed banks. Those steady losses, generally unrecorded,
provided Fowler’s main incentive. “Why did we build it? It wasn’t because some
apocalypse was coming,” he said. “It was because we knew gene banks were losing
samples, and were losing them for stupid reasons – cuts, equipment failure and
human error. Prior to the seed vault we were losing diversity. I am convinced
that we were losing at least a variety a day, silently. It was this kind of
drip, drip, drip of extinction. We put an end to that – at least for 865,000
varieties.”
In
any other gene bank, that would just be the beginning. A collection – though
frozen – is a living thing. It has value only so long as the seeds remain
viable. Over time, scientists take out samples, put them in petri dishes and
see whether they will sprout. If the samples show signs of failure, the seeds
would be sown, a new generation raised, and fresh set of samples restored to
the bank. These methods are not practical for Svalbard, because the vault is so
inaccessible. If seeds must be grown, that will happen elsewhere.
Simply
banking seeds in case of a future catastrophe is not enough to save diversity.
They have to be kept alive, and examined for potentially useful traits: inbuilt
resistance to ancient scourges, pests or droughts. Otherwise, said Phil Pardey,
an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota, the seed vault is
just taking funds that could be used to breed other plants.
“They
don’t do any of the collections, none of the testing or re-testing,” he said.
“All they are doing is parking those seeds. At the end of the day, it is just
one repository.”
Nori
Ignacio stood in a warm hotel lobby near the main shopping street of
Longyearbyen, clutching a big grey cardigan around her and glancing anxiously
out the window as a ferocious east wind battered pedestrians heading up to
town. She had been invited to Svalbard for a preview of the Crop Trust’s plans
for the seed vault. Ignacio, who is from the Philippines, is the executive
director of South-East Asia Regional
Initiatives for Community Empowerment (Searice), and has worked for years
helping farmers cope with natural disaster and climate change. She listened
closely as Fowler outlined the Crop Trust strategy for a meeting of its
international advisory panel, following up with polite but pointed questions.
“I
understand the motive is very noble, but our interest is in how to make this
initiative useful for farming communities,” she said a little while later. “The
way I see it now, it can be useful in the case of what happened to Syria. In
emergency cases like that, you need a place where you can store in safety all
the collections you have in your country. But for us in the Philippines …” her
voice trailed away.
The
battle between two schools of thought about how best to save crop diversity has
been fierce. Fowler has been accused of selling out to industry, and subjected
to public harangues. To this day, Andrew Kimbrell, the
founder of the Center for Food Safety in Washington DC – a former friend of
Fowler’s, who is now one of his fiercest critics – cannot utter the word
“Svalbard” without putting on a vaguely middle-European accent and letting out
a demonic laugh.
The
battle between two schools of thought about how best to save crop diversity has
been fierce
The
dispute centres on whether it is best to save crop diversity by working with
communities in the fields, or in institutions. It is pretty clear that it will
be extremely difficult to find the funding to do both, so, as much as
scientists say they do not like to choose sides, they are forced to do so. The
Crop Trust is betting on seed banks – with Svalbard as the ultimate back-up –
to provide a haven for the genetic materials that can be retrieved 50 or more
years in the future. That strategy has been endorsed by governments, industry,
and funding bodies such as the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since 2004, the Crop Trust has raised more
than US$410m for the vault and other seed banks. Norway, which paid for the
vault, was the biggest donor, committing US$45m, followed by America, Britain,
and Australia. The Gates Foundation has pledged nearly US$30m.
The
isolated majesty of the Svalbard seed vault, while a triumph of technology and
global cooperation, is sucking up available funding, and yet this highly centralized approach may not in the end be up to the task of helping farmers
cope with climate change, 50 or 100 years from now. New research suggests as
much as 75%
of global crop diversity exists outside the big institutional seed banks
and is held instead by some of the world’s most marginal farmers, most of them
women.
“We
recognise the importance of gene banks. We are not saying they are not
important,” said Ignacio. “But for us what they are doing, and what they have
got to do, is just collect, and there is not much interaction with the
community.” She argues that the best way to save crop diversity would be to
just help farmers get on with it.
A
few years ago, scientists might have dismissed the idea of recruiting farmers
to help save crop diversity. Emile Frison, a former director of Biodiversity
International, and an advisor to the Crop Trust. “The goal really was to
maintain that material, watching it carefully to make sure it was identical
over the years. It was almost like a religion.”It is argued with increasing
force that seed banks cannot make up for the practical knowledge of farmers on
the ground, or compete with their ingenuity. “The breeding value of these
varieties is huge, the existence value is much more amorphous,” Phil Pardey
said. “If all we did was stick the material in Svalbard and not use any of it
for breeding, it is pretty damn expensive.”
Other
scientists have complained that the Svalbard seed vault has soaked up funding
that could have been put to better use helping farmers. “The problem with
relying entirely on material in gene banks is that it freezes evolution,” said Nigel
Maxted, a plant scientist at the University of Birmingham. He has led
conservation projects in farmers’ fields and is also involved in a project with
the Crop Trust, and is convinced that other on-the-ground strategies could
prove more effective than seed vaults.
Fowler,
however, insists that field conditions expose crops to the natural disasters
and economic vagaries that made in-situ conservation so unpredictable. “It is
out in the real world – that makes it vulnerable because you have typhoons,
hurricanes, natural disasters and pests that come along,” he said. Other
variables, such as families leaving farms for cities, can lead to varieties
being lost. And keeping seeds close to the land offers no guarantees, either. “If
you’ve got a crop, an heirloom variety, a traditional variety, somewhere in
Africa, and you say, that’s great, it’s going to adapt to climate change –
well, maybe not,” Fowler said. “If it doesn’t have the right traits, your
farmer is going to starve or go out of business long before that crop will
naturally adapt through mutation.”
* * *
In
the light of day, the concrete portal of the seed vault looks a bit like an
iceberg jutting out of the snow. The staff at the Crop Trust like the visual
metaphor. The vault, they say, is just the beginning of their mission. That
became clear the weekend of the Nordic officials’ visit to the seed bank, when
Haga, in puffy red down jacket and socks, stood in the conference room of the
other big hotel in Svalbard energetically pitching German and European Union
officials and agribusiness executives about the trust’s next big idea.
The
Crop Trust is hoping to use the success of Svalbard to launch an even more
ambitious plan. It is targeting governments, foundations and agribusiness,
aiming to raise $850m, in order to provide permanent funding for the Svalbard
seed vault and a number of seed banks in other countries. For those struggling
to save diversity in the fields, it is a dazzling figure. But Haga clearly
thinks it is within her grasp. Over the last seven years, the trust has
carefully tended a network of supporters, inviting officials, company
executives, and foundation chairs to tour the vault. Their visits are followed
by some Arctic recreation: snowmobile trips to the glacier, dog-sledding with
huskies. The vault is the trust’s prime exhibit and a key part of the sales
strategy. “When you talk about a doomsday vault and you put a polar bear next
to it, people are interested in finding out more about that,” the Crop Trust’s
biodiversity adviser Frison said.
The
logistics of using the vault to sell the Crop Trust’s larger mission are
challenging, to say the least. In early February, Queen Sonja of Norway was due
to visit, after a day of skiing and other outdoor activities in Svalbard. Haga
drove up to the vault to welcome her. But as she was waiting, a blizzard roared
in from Greenland. The Norwegian royal party decided to call off the visit –
Queen Sonja is 77, after all. Haga was stranded at the vault, until the town
snow plough lumbered up the hill to dig her out.
But
Haga is indefatigable. She was already working to persuade Queen Sonja to
return, and exploring the idea of bringing other European royals and
celebrities to the vault. The Crop Trust’s mission is strictly focused on
developing seed banks – and raising funds for that is a challenge. So far, with
all the glamour of Svalbard, the trust has raised just $170m.
Whichever
of the competing strategies for saving crop diversity is the right one – in
seed banks or in the fields – the reality is that both approaches are starved
of support. What has become clear to Haga is that the seed banks are in a
terrible state. The material in storage is ageing dangerously fast – another
few years and many of the samples will be too old to produce crops. Unless
funds can be raised to plant the specimens out at research field stations and
then store the next generation of seeds, the material will be worthless. Seed
banks are also struggling to keep up with technology. In an age when anybody
can take a cheek swab to check their DNA, painfully little is known about the
genetics of the plants on which civilisation has depended for 10,000 years. The
Crop Trust is funding programmes to create an online searchable database of
global seed collections so plant breeders and scientists can seek out and then
develop desirable traits for future varieties, but the work is painfully slow.
“Today,
coming into a gene bank is a little bit like coming into a supermarket where
you don’t have labels on cans,” said Haga.
What
the Crop Trust proposed was a sort of triage on the major seed banks: selecting
those worthy of support and winnowing out those not up to standard. In its
early days, however, it is a process not unlike natural selection, Haga said.
Only one of 11 major gene banks operated under the Consortium of International Agricultural Research
Centres met the Crop Trust’s standards and would be eligible for those
funds: the International
Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
“The
biggest surprise for everybody when we dived into the international gene banks
was that they are not up to the standard that we had expected,” Haga said. “To
me, it’s obvious, we can’t fund long-term any gene bank that isn’t up to
standard because our goal is to make sure this terribly important natural
resource is available for all future generations. I can’t go to a donor and ask
them for in-perpetuity grants if I can’t guarantee that money is well spent.”
Pavel
Poc, who chairs the European parliament’s climate change, biodiversity and
sustainability group, was already a supporter. Over breakfast, a few weeks
after our first meeting in Svalbard, he said he was looking for funding from
the EU budget. “We can see with the Mona Lisa how valuable it is but we are not
able to understand that every single crop variety that disappears is of similar
value to great art,” he said. “Every single species we destroy – we cannot
simply develop again.”
Story 1: originally published in RT; Story 2: originally published in The Guardian UK
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