Doomsday seed vault for food security

Should a major catastrophe hit the planet, a doomsday seed vault deep in the Arctic ice will ensure

that survivors never go hungry.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built by the Norwegian government
for the benefit of mankind, is named after the archipelago where it is
located. The Rome-based non-governmental organisation, Global Crop
Diversity Trust, will fund its operation, according to a UN report.

The vault is hidden in a mountain deep in the Arctic permafrost at
the village of Longyearbyen, and will house more than 200,000 crop
varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The
seeds will bolster food security should any natural or manmade disaster
affect agricultural systems or gene banks.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the first seed collection will go into the vault on 26

February 2008 and the managers expect regular contributions until the
vault contains seeds of most of the world’s crops. Seeds can only be
accessed once the original seed collections have been lost.

Duplicate seeds of existing varieties are drawn from the collection
maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR), which holds 600,000 plant varieties in crop gene
banks in its centres across the world.

On 31 January, the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical
Agriculture (IITA), a CGIAR affiliate, shipped 7,000 seed samples from
more than 36 African countries to Oslo, en route to the Longyearbyen
village.

The samples include unique varieties of domesticated and wild
cowpeas, maize, soybeans and the Bambara groundnut, which the IITA has
been collecting since the 1970s.

Most of the IITA seeds are placed under the auspices of the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, which holds them in trust
for the benefit of the global community. The seeds will be stored at
-18 degrees Celsius in specially designed,

five-ply aluminium foil packages inside sealed boxes stored on high
shelves inside the vault. The low temperature and limited access to
oxygen will ensure low metabolic activity and delay aging.

“Svalbard will be able to help replenish gene banks if they’re hit,”
Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust,
told the UN news service. Iraq’s gene bank, in the town of Abu Ghraib,
was ransacked by looters in 2003, but fortunately there was a duplicate
at the CGIAR centre in Syria.

Source: www.forecasthighs.com