Lagos, Nigeria
January 31, 2008
Twenty-one boxes filled with 7,000
unique seed samples from more than 36 African nations were
shipped to the Svalbard Global
Seed Vault, a facility being built on a remote island in the
Arctic Circle as a repository of last resort for humanity’s
agricultural heritage.
The vault is being 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 26 February 2008.
The shipment, which was sent by the Ibadan, Nigeria-based
International Institute of
Tropical Agriculture (IITA), consists of thousands of
duplicates of unique varieties of domesticated and wild cowpea,
maize, soybean, and Bambara groundnut. The seeds from the IITA
genebank in Ibadan, Nigeria, were packed in 21 boxes weighing a
total of 330 kg. The processing by IITA staff took several
months, and the boxes were packaged over a three-day period,
with 10 staff checking the accession list, reporting errors, and
adjusting the inventory, as needed.
The seeds were shipped on to Oslo on route to the village of
Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where the vault
has been constructed in a mountain deep inside the Arctic
permafrost.
“IITA’s genebank houses the world’s largest collection of
cowpea, with over 15,000 unique varieties from 88 countries
around the world,” said Dr Dominique Dumet, genebank manager at
IITA. “Our collection holds in-trust about 70 percent of cowpea
landraces from Africa. Cowpea (also known as black-eyed pea in
the USA) is a key staple in Africa, offering an inexpensive
source of protein.”
This month, other centers supported by the
Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) began packing
and shipping duplicate collections from Benin, Colombia,
Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, 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.
Crop biodiversity is the raw material needed to equip crops with
critical resistance to pests and diseases, and enable them to
grow in harsher conditions of drought, salinity, and flooding,
which will likely increase with global climate change,
particularly in poor nations.
Cowpea and dozens of other crops, like cassava, yams, and
millets, are known as “orphan” crops, because they receive less
attention than they deserve relative to their value and
importance.
According to researchers at the World Vegetable Center in
Taiwan, collectively, 27 “orphan” crops with a value of $100
billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in
developing countries.
“So called ‘orphan’ crops like cowpea and groundnut are not
minor or insignificant crops,” said Cary Fowler, executive
director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. “They are of great
importance to regional food security. In addition, they are
often adapted to harsh environments and are diverse in terms of
their genetic, agroclimatic, and economic niches.”
These crops may also vary in less obvious characteristics, such
as their response to cold, heat or drought, or their ability to
tolerate specific pests and diseases. Farmers and scientists
continually draw on the genetic diversity held in crop
collections like IITA’s to ensure productive harvests.
“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.
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.
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (www.cgiar.org)
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR), established in 1971, is a strategic partnership of
countries, international and regional organizations and private
foundations supporting the work of 15 international agricultural
research Centers. In collaboration with national agricultural
research systems, civil society and the private sector, the
CGIAR fosters sustainable agricultural growth through
high-quality science aimed at benefiting the poor through
stronger food security, better human nutrition and health,
higher incomes and improved management of natural resources.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust (www.croptrust.org)
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and
availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to
the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and
diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization
working worldwide to solve this problem. |
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