Posted on 01/26/2008 11:09:25 PM PST by blam
Thousands Of Crop Varieties Depart For Arctic Seed Vault
Packaging seeds. Thousands of Crop Varieties from Four Corners of the World Depart for Arctic Seed Vault. (Credit: CIMMYT, Mexico.)
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2008) — At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.
The cornucopia of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and agroforestry plants is to be safeguarded in the facility, which was created as a repository of last resort for humanity’s agricultural heritage. The seeds will be shipped to the village of Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where the vault has been constructed on a mountain deep inside the Arctic permafrost.
The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault will open on February 26, 2008.
This first installment from the CGIAR collections will contain duplicates from international agricultural research centers based in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant varieties in crop genebanks, which are widely viewed as the foundation of global efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity.
“Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most important crop species,” said Emile Frison, Director General of Rome-based Bioversity International, which coordinates CGIAR crop diversity initiatives.
“The CGIAR collections are the ‘crown jewels’ of international agriculture,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will cover the costs of preparing, packaging and transporting CGIAR seeds to the Arctic. “They include the world’s largest and most diverse collections of rice, wheat, maize and beans. Many traditional landraces of these crops would have been lost had they not been collected and stored in the genebanks.”
For example, the wheat collection held just outside Mexico City by the CGIAR-supported International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) contains 150,000 unique samples of wheat and its relatives from more than 100 countries. It is the largest unified collection in the world for a single crop. Overall, the maize collection represents nearly 90 percent of maize diversity in the Americas, where the crop originated. CIMMYT will continue to send yearly shipments of regenerated seed until the entire collection of maize and wheat has been backed up at Svalbard.
Storage of these and all the other seeds at Svalbard is intended to ensure that they will be available for bolstering food security should a manmade or natural disaster threaten agricultural systems, or even the genebanks themselves, at any point in the future.
“We need to understand that genebanks are not seed museums but the repositories of vital, living resources that are used almost every day in the never-ending battle against major threats to food production,” Bioversity International’s Frison said. “We’re going to need this diversity to breed new varieties that can adapt to climate change, new diseases and other rapidly emerging threats.”
Why are genebanks important?
The CGIAR collections are famous in plant breeding circles as a treasure trove for plant breeders searching for traits to help them combat destructive crop diseases and pests, such as the black sigatoka fungus, which is devastating banana production in East Africa, and grain borer beetle, which is destroying maize in Kenya.
Just from January to August of 2007, CGIAR centers distributed almost 100,000 samples. The materials mainly go to researchers and plant breeders seeking genetic traits to create new crop varieties that offer such benefits as higher yields, improved nutritional value, resistance to pests and diseases, and the ability to survive changing climatic conditions, which are expected to make floods and drought more frequent.
In addition, these collections have often been used to help restore agricultural systems after conflicts and natural disasters.
For example, among the 135,000 food and forage seeds maintained at the CGIAR-supported International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria, 3,000 varieties are native to Afghanistan, and 1,000 are from Iraq. The seeds preserved have been used to help revitalize crop diversity in these war-torn regions.
“Svalbard will be able to help replenish genebanks if they’re hit,” said Cary Fowler. Iraq’s genebank in the town of Abu Ghraib was ransacked by looters in 2003. Fortunately there was a safety duplicate at the CGIAR center in Syria. Typhoon Xangsane seriously damaged the genebank of the Philippines national rice genebank in 2006. “Unfortunately, these kinds of national genebank horror stories are fairly common place,” said Fowler. “The Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes the CGIAR’s genebank collections safer than ever.”
After the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004, the CGIAR-supported International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) used its collections to provide farmers with rice varieties suitable for growing in fields that had been inundated with salt water. The genebank at the CGIAR-supported International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Palmira, Colombia was instrumental in providing bean varieties to farmers in Honduras and Nicaragua in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
According to Geoff Hawtin, Acting Director General of CIAT and former executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, “The shipments going to Svalbard from the CGIAR genebanks are a vital measure for further safeguarding the world’s crop collections. With coming climatic changes, higher food prices, and expanding markets for biofuels, our best available options for progress, if not survival, will be in what we have conserved and studied against all thinkable predictions.”
Adapted from materials provided by Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
ping
I want a pesticide vault.
I can’t remember which as I watch both a lot but either the History Channel or the National Geographic channel just recently had a one hour program about this place and the why and whats. Very interesting show.
Only Turd world seeds need apply?
Thanks for posting this, Blam.
I’m often accused of being a “Crunchy Con” because while I’m totally Conservative, I’m also considered by some to be kind of a “Hippie” because I keep an organic garden and orchard on my farm, live simply, work close to home in a sector that I LOVE (Garden Center), etc. I also have seven years of working for The Seed Savers Exchange under my belt. Pretty good for a Conservative, wouldn’t you say? LOL! SSE keeps a seed vault in IA, as well. I think there’s a government seed vault in CO, too.
BUT...this is VERY serious, FRiends. When the seeds are gone, so is the FOOD.
Kinda alarmed here.
"All the Time in the World." :)
“Kinda alarmed here.”
At me, or the seed vaults? ;)
That's funny, I was thinking of something similar. In my scenario, it's a hungry future Magellan who stumbles across the cave and finds a nice snack to go with his fish dinner.
Better add some pictographic instructions/explanations, too.
LOL.
I remember an incident some decades when we sent seed grain to India (I think) and hunger was so bad there that they ate the seeds...problem was, the seeds had already been coated with a poison. Many died.
This is all being done so that the surviving New World Order elitists will be able to eat old fashioned home grown tomatoes.
A few years back my Eco-SIL (her HEART is in the right place, her BRAIN is elsewhere) tried to talk our FIL into sending a goat to a Third World country or some such thing. I think it’s called “The Heifer Project?”
We all pool our money at Christmas and do something “charitable” and the family takes a vote on where to send our cash, but Dad has the final say in it.
His tirade on “they’ll just EAT it, they don’t know what to DO to CREATE food for themselves, they’ll just kill the Golden Goose, etc.” is now our Christmastime mantra. ;)
He DOES have a point. I’m a “Teach a man to fish,” Gal, myself.
But, when you’re starving due to tin-pot dictators taking the cream, where does your thinking lie?
Democracy for all! No matter how cr@ppy it may seem at times. No one is “starving” in the Good Old USofA, that’s for sure. Democracy for all! Seeds for all! :)
What I wanna know is if I have a bag of beans, say like pinto beans or red beans in my pantry, if I soak a handful in the spring and throw them in the ground, will I get like, you know, bean PLANTS?
I mean I can buy a one pound bag of beans for about the same as a paltry seed packet that has 17 bean seeds.
Just wonderin.
Gardening PING!
Great find, blam!!!!
Usually. Not many will sprout as compared to the seed packet though.
Hope they include some beer recipes.
“What I wanna know is if I have a bag of beans, say like pinto beans or red beans in my pantry, if I soak a handful in the spring and throw them in the ground, will I get like, you know, bean PLANTS?”
Yes, you will. But not all will germinate (sprout) due to age and other factors. Food beans are handled differently than beans for sewing in the following season. Bean seeds lose their germination rate quickly. The larger the seed, the shorter its shelf-life. (For example, lettuce and radish seed are really small...they have a longer “viability” than do a bean seed or a corn kernel seed. The smaller the seed, the longer it “lasts.”)
If you’ve ever grown beans for the dry beans (seeds) you need ACRES to fill that bag-o-beans that you buy for $1 at The Dollar Store. An average garden plot won’t produce the quantity needed unless you have a 1/4 acre or so to devote only to dry beans. Each pod produces 4-5 seeds (beans.) Each plant produces 12-20 or so pods holding 4-5 bean seeds. You do the math...and don’t get me started on what a PITA it is to harvest and shell them. How dried beans EVER became the food staple of starving, Third World countries is beyond me. The labor ALONE in ‘beans and rice’ boggles the mind.
Learn to hunt, Dudes! ;)
And then, as another consideration, some of your bagged beans may be bush beans and some may be pole beans. Pole beans are MUCH more productive and you can grow a lot more on less land as they grow UP with proper supports.
If you’re really willing to try growing drying beans this upcoming season, I’d say...don’t do it! No matter WHAT your politics, hit The Dollar Store and buy yourself a bag-o-beans for a dollar.
Believe me, I’ve done many test plots for drying beans over the years...it’s a fruitless effort. And I’m STILL hungry at the end of the day. I just don’t GET it!
It will work, but the percentage that will actually germinate is low. You will get near 100% with a seed packet. Even saving packet seeds from year-to-year you will get a drop off, unless you keep them under tightly controlled conditions. I have kept them several years in a vacuum sealed jar in the freezer.
Thanks for the ping. Good article.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.