NOTE:
- The “Doomsday Seed Vault”announced in January 2006 officially opened 2008-02-26. By then Monsanto was a funder, along with Syngenta, the Bill Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. This article pretty well covers things, with additional links: 2011-12-23 GMO (Update Spitzbergen) Discover the doomsday seed vault’s secrets
- I am quite sure that the video “Life Running Out of Control” has footage from Spitzbergen (prior to Monsanto’s involvement).
Stowing seeds for disaster
Norway to create super-cold storage vault of edible plant life
Page A1, Special to The Globe and Mail
PARIS — The future of humankind may soon be buried deep within a sandstone mountain, locked in permafrost and encased in concrete behind blast-proof doors designed to foil terrorists.
The bold experiment to preserve two million seeds, representing a veritable Noah’s ark of the world’s food crops, is expected to take shape this year on a remote Norwegian island.
The seed bank, sponsored by the Norwegian government and a private trust promoting crop diversity, is meant to preserve the genetic building blocks of edible plants in the case of nuclear war, crop disease, catastrophic climate change, earthquakes or other natural or man-made disasters.
“If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet,” said Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome.
The trust was established in association with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and aims to collect and safeguard crop diversity, in part through seed banks established across the world.
Mr. Fowler spoke to the British magazine New Scientist for an article to be published on Saturday.
The Norwegian super-cold storage vault, estimated to cost about $3-million (U.S.), should eventually stock seeds from plant varieties from every continent, according to the magazine.
Most of the seeds will be taken from inventories in existing seed banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the safety of the storehouses has been compromised by electricity failures, political turmoil and poor security.
The Norwegian facility, slated for Spitsbergen in the frozen Svalbard islands, will be “a fail-safe depository,” Mr. Fowler said.
“This will be the world’s most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,” he added. “But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason.”
In announcing the project, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry called the Svalbard islands north of the mainland an ideal location for the deep-freeze stash, saying that seeds would be preserved in the permafrost even if electricity supplies fail.
Spitsbergen, population 2,330, lies at about 81 degrees north latitude. It boasts summer high temperatures around the freezing mark, a polar jazz festival in January and what is billed as the most northerly marathon race in June.
Sixty per cent of its land mass is covered by glaciers and fields of snow.
The temperature yesterday was a balmy 0, but with the wind-chill factor taken into account, the outside temperature felt like -19.
New Scientist reported that the seed bank would be built inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost. The vault will be lined with reinforced concrete walls about one-metre thick, the magazine said, and sealed by blast-proof doors meant to protect the stock from terrorists and global warming.
The idea for an Arctic seed bank dates back more than 20 years. Cold War concerns about the Svalbard archipelago and the island of Spitsbergen, which was exploited by Soviet mining companies under a 1920 treaty with Norway, discouraged attempts to use the frozen wasteland for such a sensitive international project.
In 2004, an international treaty aimed at preserving and sharing plant genetic resources was enacted, paving the way for co-operative and modern seed banks like the one to be built in Norway.
When the treaty was adopted, experts warned that the world was too dependent on too few crops, with only 150 varieties feeding most of the world’s population and genetic diversity declining sharply.