El Batán, Mexico
January 31, 2008
CIMMYT recently sent three tons of maize and wheat seed to a
“doomsday vault” near the North Pole to keep it—and the valuable
genetic diversity it embodies—safe for future generations.
On 22 January 2008, CIMMYT sent more than 160 boxes of seed for
long-term deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway. The
shipment comprised 10,000 seed collections of maize and 47,000
of wheat, held in trust by CIMMYT, and weighed around 3 tons in
all. “This represents roughly a third of the center’s entire
collection of crop genetic resources,” says
Tom Payne, head of wheat
genetic resources at CIMMYT. The shipment was part of more than
230,000 seed samples of crop varieties sent this month for
storage in the vault, from germplasm banks of the
Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), NGOs, and
national program collections.
Sheltering frail seed
As any farmer knows, seed is the basis of the world’s food
supply. For plant breeders, seed also holds the genetic
diversity needed to defend crops against adverse conditions,
like drought and heat, or against damaging pests and diseases.
But, whereas genetic diversity strengthens crops against
threats, the seed that bears it is relatively vulnerable. In
1998, for example, Hurricane Mitch’s floodwaters destroyed the
maize seed of Honduran farmers and of a national institution in
charge of seed. In another case, during Latin America’s “lost
decade” economic crisis of the 1980s, many national seed banks
lacked funds to maintain adequately unique collections of native
maize landraces no longer grown in farmers’ fields.
“In both instances, we helped replenish or regenerate the lost
or endangered seed collections, but these and other cases
illustrate the natural fragility of seed and the need for
multiple safeguards,” says
Suketoshi Taba, head of maize genetic resources at CIMMYT.
The center’s own seed collections are held in constant
low-temperature and low-humidity conditions in a concrete bunker
at CIMMYT’s El Batán, Mexico, facilities. They are secured
against earthquakes, power outages, insect or rodent damage, and
other threats.
Food and diversity for future generations
The Svalbard vault, which will open officially on 27 February
2008, provides another level of security. It 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. Its aim is to ensure that seed
collections remain safe against cataclysmic events, such as a
nuclear war, natural disasters, accidents, mismanagement, or
short-sighted budget cuts. Carved into rock and permafrost on an
island where polar bears roam, the vault can conserve seed for
hundreds and, in the case of some crop species, thousands of
years.
CIMMYT’s own germplasm bank conserves more than 140,000
collections of wheat and its relatives from over 100
countries—the largest unified collection in the world for a
single crop. For maize, the center conserves more than 25,000
unique seed collections, including the world's largest store of
maize landraces (traditional farmer varieties), along with
samples of the wild relatives teosinte and Tripsacum spp. and of
improved varieties. The maize collections represent nearly 90%
of maize diversity in the Americas, the hemisphere of origin for
the crop. “Most of the seed collections are held ‘in trust’—that
is, under long-term storage for the benefit of humanity and free
from any intellectual property restrictions,” according to Masa
Iwanaga, CIMMYT Director General. CIMMYT also observes the terms
of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food
and Agriculture, signed in 2004.
Occasionally a source to replenish partners’ collections in
cases of catastrophe, CIMMYT germplasm bank collections are most
often used for the center’s own research and the work of
others—each year CIMMYT typically ships more than 5,000 seed
samples, in response to requests from hundreds of researchers in
dozens of countries worldwide. The collections also furnish
useful genes for resistance to diseases and pests of both crops,
as well as tolerance to constraints such as drought or poor
soils.
“The maize seed we sent to Svalbard included collections backed
up at CIMMYT over the last 15 years, as part of a cooperative
program to regenerate endangered seed from Latin American
germplasm banks,” says Taba. The wheat shipment to the vault
comprised samples from collections regenerated over the past two
years, according to Payne. “We’ll continue sending back-ups of
regenerated collections to Svalbard each year, until the entire
CIMMYT maize and wheat stores are represented in the vault
holdings,” says Payne.
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