In an effort to protect crop biodiversity and the ability to restart agricultural production after a potential disaster, a “Global Seed Vault” was opened on 26 February. The vault contains three cold rooms surrounded by permafrost in a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. It has the potential to house 4.5 million batches of seeds, or approximately 2 billion seeds. At it’s opening, the Global Seed Vault had 268,000 samples.
Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the crop biotechnology division at Catholic University (Belgium) said, “the erosion of plants’ genetic resources is really going fast.” According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, “three-quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the last century.” The goal of the Global Seed Vault is to “protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world” from climate change, politics and human error.
Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s prime minister, said “with climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization.” Stoltenberg also described the vault as “the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity.” Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust added that “crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints, and for meeting the food needs of a growing population.”
Various agricultural NGOs criticised the Global Seed Vault, however, as “fundamentally unjust in its objectives.” For example, agriculture lobby GRAIN said “the ultimate beneficiaries will [] be the very same corporations that are at the roots of crop-diversity destruction.” The GREEN Foundation added that “it is already a decade since the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro and the Convention on Biological Diversity realised that gene banks had their own limitations, starting from major power breakdowns, to excluding farmers’ access to these banks, to realising that seeds conserved under freeze conditions did not evolve when grown under changed environmental conditions.”
“‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opens in Arctic,” ASSOCIATED PRESS, 27 February 2008; “Near Arctic, Seed Vault is a Fort Knox of Food,” NEW YORK TIMES, 29 February 2008; “Arctic ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opens Doors for 100 Million Seeds,” SCIENCEDAILY, 27 February 2008; “Development: NGOs Wary of Doomsday Seed Vault,” INTER PRESS SERVICE, 4 March 2008.