About 90,000 food crop seed samples have arrived at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway as part of anniversary celebrations.The goal of the so-called Doomsday Vault project is to preserve biodiversity through saving the genetic material of many food crops from around the world. The four tonnes of new arrivals takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million. It now stores samples from a third of the planet's important food crop varieties.
The Establishment of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault Facility
Doomsday vault was established by the international community deep inside a mountain on Norway's Svalbard archipelago for the conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity. Svalbard archipelago was chosen for the vault as the area was geologically stable, remote, and has permafrost that would act as natural refrigeration. The site is north of mainland Norway. The vault has three secure rooms at the end of a 125m tunnel, and four sets of locked doors. $7m facility took 12 months to build. It houses samples of food crops in an -18C freezer
A Flashback
Norway first proposed the project in the 1980s but it did not see the daylight because of security concerns. The perceived threat was Soviet Union of the cold war era, which had access to Spitsbergen at the time. With the end of the cold war the situation changed dramatically. International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources was signed and with it all the stumbling blocks were cleared. The project had the seal of approval of UN.Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organization is the chief promoter. Formal inauguration took place on 26th February 2008. At the inaugural ceremony last year Norwegian Prime Minister Jen Stoltenberg and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai placed the first seeds in the repository.
Precautions
The facility has taken in to account all possible calamities including nuclear war, climate change, rising sea levels, earthquakes and terrorism. Collapse of electricity supplies has also been factored in to. The ambitious project would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet in the event of a calamity.
The Vital Importance of the Doomsday Seed Vault Project
Preserving crop diversity is very important for the human race. There is a classic example from Ireland. In the 1800s more than one million people are believed to have died there when blight wiped out potato harvests. It was a lack of diversity among Ireland's potato crops that brought in the calamity. Among the new arrivals to the repository are 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland's national gene banks.
When full, the seed vault in Norway will hold 4.5m samples. This would come to about two billion seeds sourced from more than 100 countries around the world. This is obviously something to cheer about and augurs well for the future
Mohan Alembath - I am a retired wildlife warden who has put in 30 years service in the wildlife reserves of Kerala,India. I was trained at Forest College ...
