Longyearbyen, Norway
February 26, 2009
With new evidence warning
climate change threatens food production, scientists gather in
Svalbard to discuss crop diversity and the vault's role in
averting agricultural disaster
 Four
tons of seeds - almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop
species - from food crop collections maintained by Canada,
Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural
research centers in Syria, Mexico and Colombia, were delivered
today to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as it celebrated its
one-year anniversary. The repository, located near the village
of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, has in
one year amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed
samples – some 200 million seeds.
"We are especially proud to see such a large number of countries
work quickly to provide samples from their collections for
safekeeping in the vault," said Norwegian Agriculture Minister
Lars Peder Brekk. "It shows that there are situations in the
world today capable of transcending politics and inspiring a
strong unity of purpose among a diverse community of nations."
"The vault was opened last year to ensure that one day all of
humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely
protected from any threat to agricultural production, natural or
man made. It's amazing how far we have come toward accomplishing
that goal," said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global
Crop Diversity Trust, which operates the seed vault in
partnership with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic
Resource Center in Sweden.
For example, in its first year of operation, the vault at
Svalbard has so far received duplicates of nearly half of the
crop samples maintained by the genebanks of the international
agricultural research centers of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
These international genebanks are seen as the custodians of the
crown jewels of crop diversity. This diversity has been
instrumental in the breeding of new varieties responsible for
the remarkable productivity gains made in global agriculture in
recent decades, and in averting food crises when farm production
has been threatened by natural disasters, plant diseases, and
plant pests.
To mark the anniversary of the vault, experts on global warming
and its effects on food production have gathered in Longyearbyen
to discuss how climate change could pose a major threat to food
production, and to examine crop diversity's role in averting
crisis. They include the authors of a study published last month
in Science magazine warning that by the end of this century the
average temperatures during growing seasons in many regions will
probably be higher than the most extreme heat recorded over the
last 100 years. Crop diversity will be required by scientists to
breed new varieties able to flourish in such dramatically
different conditions.
"This means that the vital importance of crop diversity to our
food supply, which inspired the creation of the seed vault, is
neither remote nor theoretical but immediate and real," said
David Battisti, a climate change expert at the University of
Washington and one of the lead authors of the paper.
"When we see research indicating that global warming could
diminish maize production by 30 percent in southern Africa in
only 20 years' time, it shows that crop diversity is needed to
adapt agriculture to climate change right now," added Frank Loy,
former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and an
advisor to President Obama's transition team on environment and
climate change, who is also attending.
With its new acquisitions, the vault is now providing a secure
second home for a third of humanity's most important crop
varieties, and a level of security for crop diversity
conservation that was not available until a year ago. More
genebanks and countries are in the process of signing agreements
and preparing seeds collections to deposit in the vault.
Seeds arriving for the vault anniversary include samples of 32
varieties of potatoes in addition to oat, wheat, barley, and
native grass species from two of Ireland's national gene banks.
Ireland's participation and its inclusion of potato varieties is
particularly appropriate for an occasion celebrating crop
diversity. It was a lack of diversity that is believed to have
made Ireland's potato crop particularly vulnerable to the
devastating blight of the mid-1800s that lead to the deaths of
more than one million people.
In addition to Ireland's contribution, 3,800 samples of wheat
and barley have come from Switzerland's national seed bank in
Changins. The United States is sending 20,000 samples from the
seed repository maintained by the federal Department of
Agriculture that represents 361 crop species. They include
samples of crop varieties that originally came from 151
countries and are now part of the U.S. collection.
Like all seeds coming to the vault, the samples arriving today
are duplicates of seeds from other collections. The vault is
intended to serve as a fail-safe backup should the original
samples be lost or damaged or, more dramatically, to provide
something of a Noah's ark for agriculture in the event of a
global catastrophe.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust
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, and has already raised
over $140 million. For further information, please visit:
www.croptrust.org.
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