Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops
20 September 2007
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A follow up article on the Arctic Vault that we posted about sometime back.
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The project is at the heart of an effort by Fowler’s foundation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to safeguard strains of 21 essential crops, such as wheat, barley and rice.
Rice alone exists in about 120,000 different varieties.
Ultimately, it is part of the world battle against hunger, as crop insecurity mainly hurts poor nations.
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The aim is to preserve genetic diversity, needed by plant breeders in the future to produce varieties able to adapt to challenges like climate change.
Crops consist of numerous species, some as different from each other as a “Dachshund from a Great Dane”, Fowler said.
If such a store had existed 10 years ago, he said, the seeds would have been needed about once a year as seed collections have been wiped out — for instance by a typhoon in the Philippines and war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Eventually, the vault will have capacity for around 4.5 million bar-coded seed samples and it hopes in its first year to collect half a million.
Not all seeds can be stored by freezing. Banana, the world’s fourth or fifth most valuable crop, is one example.
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Norway is contributing some 50 million crowns ($8.6 million) to build the cavern, a sum which Development Aid Minister Erik Solheim said was a pittance for what is gained.
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The Gates Foundation, the philanthropic giant created by the founder of Microsoft, has given a $30 million grant to Fowler’s effort, including money for packaging seeds in their countries of origin and shipping them to the vault.
Some of Gates’ money has gone to develop a new style of seed packet, a small silver-colored pouch made of a special foil and layers of other advanced materials to keep seeds dry and frozen — the “Rolls Royce of seed packets”, Fowler said.
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The underground “Noah’s Ark” is carved into the Arctic mountainside.
Photo: AFP
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