SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
global seed vault
'We Can't Trust the Permafrost Anymore': Doomsday Vault at Risk in Norway
"Not good."
Mar 27, 2019
Just over a decade after it first opened, the world's "doomsday vault" of seeds is imperiled by climate change as the polar region where it's located warms faster than any other area on the planet.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in late February 2008, was built by the organization Crop Trust and the Norwegian government on the island of Svalbard next to the northernmost town in the world with more than 1,000 residents, Longyearbyen.
"Svalbard is the ultimate failsafe for biodiversity of crops," said Crop Trust executive director Marie Haga.
Northern temperatures and environment on the island were a major reason for the construction. According to in-depth reporting from CNN, the project planners hoped that the permafrost around the construction of the underground vault would, in time, refreeze. But the planet has other plans.
Longyearbyen and, by extension, the vault, is warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet. That's because the polar regions of Earth--the coldest areas on the planet--are less able to reflect sunlight away from the polar seas due to disappearing ice and snow cover.
\u201c'Doomsday vault' town warming faster than any other on Earth: 3.7 degrees Centigrade warming already in this Arctic town. Permafrost melting. Buildings sinking. https://t.co/oFLGjNyhad\u201d— John Raymond Hanger (@John Raymond Hanger) 1553685634
It's an ironic turn of events for the creators of the vault, who chose the location for the vault "because the area is not prone to volcanoes or earthquakes, while the Norwegian political system is also extremely stable,'" said CNN.
Because of the warming, the permafrost around the underground vault's tunnel entrance has not refrozen. That led to leaking water in the tunnel in October 2016, which then froze into ice.
In response, CNN reported, "Statsbygg [the Norwegian state agency in charge of real estate] undertook 100 million Norwegian krone ($11.7 million) of reconstruction work, more than double the original cost of the structure."
But the warming now may become unsustainable for the structure. It's already forcing changes to Longyearbyen's population of 2,144 as the people in the town find themselves scrambling to avoid avalanches and deal with a changing climate that's more often dumping rain rather than snow.
"We can't trust the permafrost anymore," said Statsbygg communications manager Hege Njaa Aschim.
British advocacy group Global Citizen was more to the point.
"Not good," the group tweeted.
\u201cNot good. https://t.co/8qSmzYGD1P\u201d— Global Citizen UK (@Global Citizen UK) 1553699038
Keep ReadingShow Less
Syrian War Forces First-Ever Withdrawal from Global Seed Vault
After armed conflict destabilized Aleppo gene bank, scientists withdraw seeds from Arctic repository in order to safeguard critical research
Oct 19, 2015
The ongoing armed conflict in Syria has forced scientists to withdraw seeds from the Arctic seed vault, safeguarding the world's food supply. The Crop Trust oversees the repository and confirmed Monday that this is the first time.
Buried in the remote Svalbard peninsula in the Arctic and designed to withstand rising sea levels, the vault was established eight years ago by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and NordGen. It preserves roughly 860,000 samples from gene banks worldwide to fortify international supply in case of catastrophe.
The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)--an important gene bank based in Aleppo, Syria--was one of many worldwide that sent seeds to the Arctic for safekeeping.
"The seeds in ICARDA's care are a globally important collection with 65 percent as unique landraces and wild relatives of cereals, legumes, and forages collected from regions such as the 'Fertile Crescent' in Western Asia, the Abyssinian highlands in Ethiopia, and the Nile Valley where earliest known crop domestication practices were recorded in civilization," the Crop Trust explained in a statement released Monday.
However, due to ongoing war and conflict, research at the Aleppo facility has been destabilized.
"ICARDA managed to move its headquarters from Syria in the early days of the war, while some of its workers remained at the gene bank in Aleppo in an attempt to save the collection," the Crop Trust said last month. "The organization managed to duplicate 80 percent of its collection in Svalbard as of March this year, where the seeds were safely stored along with others from around the world."
So, ICARDA scientists asked the Svalbard vault to return their seed deposits to new research facilities in Lebanon and Morocco to allow them to continue their research.
"The gene bank in Aleppo is still operative, but the uncertain national situation impedes sufficient recultivation of seeds to meet the demand," explained an official statement from Norway's Ministry of Agriculture and Food. "ICARDA, therefore, has requested the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to return a large proportion of seed samples deposited there in a number of shipments since 2008, aiming to grow new seed supplies."
The Crop trust confirmed on Monday that 38,000 seed samples "were safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon today, having undertaken a 10,000 kilometre roundtrip. These seeds could be key to developing new crop varieties crucial to meeting world food demands with climate change."
Meanwhile, ICARDA criticized media reports that the Aleppo facility is completely nonfunctional earlier this month, stating: "The security situation in Syria has significantly affected ICARDA's field-related activities. However, despite all difficulties, the storage facilities of its GeneBank are still operational."
"In one sense, it would be preferable if we never had to retrieve seeds from the Seed Vault, as a withdrawal signifies a significant problem elsewhere in the world," said Marta Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. "However, we can now see that the Vault as the ultimate fail-safe works the way it was intended to do."
Keep ReadingShow Less
NGOs Wary of Doomsday Seed Vault
Mar 04, 2008
Agricultural non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in India and elsewhere criticize the newly-opened Global Seed Vault (GSV) at Svalbard in Norway as fundamentally unjust in its objectives.
The Barcelona-based agriculture lobby GRAIN, with branches in major developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, says the seed vault has a serious deficiency because it deals mainly with state and private depositors, thereby excluding the rights of poor farmers who cannot access these seeds.
GRAIN says the GSV's ex-situ storage system removes unique plant varieties from farming communities that originally created, selected, protected, and shared the seeds. Farmers are excluded because they do not know how to access the scientific and institutional framework for setting up the system.
"This system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders,'' GRAIN's Asia Program Officer, Shalini Bhutani, who is based in New Delhi, told IPS.
She says that negotiating intellectual property and other rights over seeds, originally conserved by farmers, becomes the business of governments and the seed industry itself.
The Norwegian government will make Decisions on the GSV, which is currently regarded as trustworthy but without guarantee that its policies will change. It has a ten-year agreement with depositors, including clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change.
A tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, a cooperative effort of Nordic countries, outlines the management of the GSV.
GRAIN alleges that decisions on the GSV will be shared with the GCDT, a private entity with strong corporate funding, which brings to the forefront all the 'terrible controversies' over access to and benefits from global agricultural biodiversity.
Trans-national seed corporations currently control over half of the world's 30 billion US dollar yearly seed market, buying up many public plant-breeding programs with governments relinquishing control. "The ultimate beneficiaries will thus be the very same corporations at the roots of crop-diversity destruction,'' says a GRAIN publication.
But Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), which is in charge of the GSV, says such criticism "seriously misrepresents the purpose and workings of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and portrays the GCDT in an inaccurate, misleading, and unflattering manner."
"The Seed Vault has been welcomed by over 165 countries and the Food and Agricultural Organizations (FAO)'s Commission on Genetic Resources, and it is already being used by developed and developing countries and by NGO seed savers (though not by corporations)", said Fowler in an e-mail interview with IPS.
The GSV is built into the Arctic permafrost, which has a natural temperature of minus 6 degrees centigrade. It is some 1,000 km from the North Pole. Three cold rooms are further cooled to minus 18 degrees C, and the facility can store 4.5 million batches of seeds.
Should some major disaster hit world agriculture, such as a nuclear war or a natural disaster, countries could turn to what is popularly called the 'doomsday vault', to pull out seeds and restart food production.
However, many are unhappy with the GSV continuing to exist in the science of agricultural conservation.
The Bangalore-based GREEN Foundation, which won the United Nations Equator Prize in 2004 for its work on seed conservation on farms through community seed-bank networks, which are mainly run by women, says the vault's claim to protect genetic biodiversity is more 'illusion than reality'.
"It is already a decade since the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) realized that gene banks had their limitations, starting from major power breakdowns to excluding farmers' access to these banks to realizing that seeds conserved under freeze conditions did not evolve when grown under changed environmental conditions," Vanaja Ramprasad, founder-director of the GREEN Foundation told IPS. "It is a sad commentary on the science behind the assumption that the world's food is secure inside a freezer,'' she said.
NGOs like Green Foundation, GRAIN, and the Hyderabad-based Deccan Development Society believe that involving farmers to grow seeds in their fields and conserving and exchanging these with others is the most secure method of conserving genetic diversity and resources.
In the last ten years, says Ramprasad, there have been worldwide efforts to collect and conserve germplasm on farmers' fields, breaking the notion that germplasm was meant only for breeding purposes. "This reinforced the fact that in situ conservation of germplasm was not only the food security of millions of the world's population, but also identified as imperative to food sovereignty," she said.
The Hyderabad-based Deccan Development Society (DDS), working in rural empowerment of poor dalit (the lowest caste in India's social hierarchy) women, and conserving indigenous cereals such as millets, does not believe that the scientific community can save crop diversity by cold-storage systems.
"Global seed wealth can survive only in the farms and homes of global rural communities. The GSV takes away these seeds from the farmer and breaks the first link in the food chain," says P.V. Satheesh, founder of DDS.
A depositor in the GSV currently is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), run under the FAO and has approximately 15 global gene banks holding the world's most widely-used food crops under a legal trusteeship arrangement on behalf of the international community.
GRAIN faults CGIAR's system as having excluded farmers totally from the trusteeship, a system being linked with the GSV which will give the CGIAR 'almost exclusive' access to the vault's deposits.
Accessions from India and Asia are part of the collections from India's Rice Research Institute and from the Hyderabad-based International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), under the aegis of CGIAR, that are to be locked in the GSV. "This vault is more the need of the life-sciences industry, known for its 'pirating' of farmers' material and traditional knowledge,'' said GRAIN's Bhutani.
An ICRISAT press note says that the organization's participation in the duplicate conservation of seeds in the vault increases global agriculture's protection from climate change. But the seeds or germplasm to be transferred by ICRISAT are those of hardy dryland sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeon pea, groundnut, and six small millets that can withstand climate change.
Bhutani says that conservation methods should be adopted along with this strategy, adding that there is nothing on offer to believe that Svalbard will be invincible in its protection.
ICRISAT has given examples of protection offered through its 1,400-odd genebanks in various countries. It says sorghum germplasm lost during civil wars in Ethiopia and Rwanda was replenished from the collection stored in its genebanks.
GRAIN recommends that governments first support their national farmers and markets rather than international gene banks, leaving seeds in the hands of local farmers with their innovative farming and seed-exchange practices. Developing countries with agro-biodiversity assets need to safeguard their farmers' interests before agreeing to corporate-controlled agricultural agreements, it said.
Fowler said the GCDT endorses the view that ex-situ and in-situ conservation are complementary.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular