OT: seeds for the future

[Guest guest]

good idea, eh?

J. Pedersen DC

Doomsday vault to avert world famine

12 January 2006

From New Scientist Print Edition

Fred Pearce

WITHIN

a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island

just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of

humanity.

The

room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds,

representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being

built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate

change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing

collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this

would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says

Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an

independent international organisation promoting the project.

New Scientist

has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the

seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3 million

vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with

permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault

will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be

protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It

will not be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by

polar bears", says Fowler.

“If the worst came to the worst, the seed vault

would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet”

The

vault's seed collection, made up of duplicates of those already held at

other seed banks, will represent the products of some 10,000 years of

plant breeding by the world's farmers. Though most are no longer widely

planted, the varieties contain vital genetic traits still regularly

used in plant breeding.

To

survive, the seeds need freezing temperatures. Operators plan to

replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in

Spitsbergen are around -18 °C. But even if some catastrophe meant that

the vault was abandoned, the permafrost would keep the seeds viable.

And even accelerated global warming would take many decades to

penetrate the mountain vault.

"This

will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,"

says Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other samples

have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a

conventional seed bank."

Norway

first proposed the project in the 1980s but it was shelved because of

security concerns: under an international treaty the Soviet Union had

access to Spitsbergen at the time. With the end of the cold war and the

signing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which

gives legal protection to national crops, the door was open for the

idea's revival.

The

project also comes at a time when there is growing concern about the

safety of existing seed banks around the world. Many have been

criticised for their poor security, ageing refrigeration systems and

vulnerable electricity supplies. In the late 1980s, terrorists

ransacked an international potato seed bank in the Peruvian Andes,

while more recently anti-globalisation campaigners have demonstrated

against other banks.

The

new Fort Knox for the world's crops will start by taking seeds from the

network of seed banks run in the Philippines, Mexico, Syria, Nigeria

and elsewhere by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural

Research, which is part-funded by the World Bank. "We will then add

samples from elsewhere until we have a complete set of the world's crop

varieties," says Fowler.

The

scheme won UN approval at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture

Organization in Rome last October. A feasibility study said the

facility "would essentially be built to last forever".