[MPWG] Doomsday vault to hold 2 million seeds - newspaper article FYI

[Susan_Jewell at fws.gov]

 Doomsday vault to avert world famine                                       
 12 January 2006                                                            
 From New Scientist Print Edition                                           
 Fred Pearce                                                                
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 WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold    
 island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of   
 humanity.                                                                  
 The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds,    
 representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built   
 to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change,  
 terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of      
 electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow    
 the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler,    
 director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international  
 organisation promoting the project.                                        
 New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to     
 create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3    
 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with    
 permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will   
 have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind 
 two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be           
 permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says 
 Fowler.                                                                    
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 “If the worst came to the worst, the seed vault would allow the world to   
 reconstruct agriculture on this planet”                                    
 The vault's seed collection, made up of duplicates of those already held   
 at other seed banks, will represent the products of some 10,000 years of   
 plant breeding by the world's farmers. Though most are no longer widely    
 planted, the varieties contain vital genetic traits still regularly used   
 in plant breeding.                                                         
 To survive, the seeds need freezing temperatures. Operators plan to        
 replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in         
 Spitsbergen are around -18 °C. But even if some catastrophe meant that the 
 vault was abandoned, the permafrost would keep the seeds viable. And even  
 accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the        
 mountain vault.                                                            
 "This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of          
 magnitude," says Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other   
 samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather    
 than a conventional seed bank."                                            
 Norway first proposed the project in the 1980s but it was shelved because  
 of security concerns: under an international treaty the Soviet Union had   
 access to Spitsbergen at the time. With the end of the cold war and the    
 signing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which      
 gives legal protection to national crops, the door was open for the idea's 
 revival.                                                                   
 The project also comes at a time when there is growing concern about the   
 safety of existing seed banks around the world. Many have been criticised  
 for their poor security, ageing refrigeration systems and vulnerable       
 electricity supplies. In the late 1980s, terrorists ransacked an           
 international potato seed bank in the Peruvian Andes, while more recently  
 anti-globalisation campaigners have demonstrated against other banks.      
 The new Fort Knox for the world's crops will start by taking seeds from    
 the network of seed banks run in the Philippines, Mexico, Syria, Nigeria   
 and elsewhere by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural      
 Research, which is part-funded by the World Bank. "We will then add        
 samples from elsewhere until we have a complete set of the world's crop    
 varieties," says Fowler.                                                   
 The scheme won UN approval at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture        
 Organization in Rome last October. A feasibility study said the facility   
 "would essentially be built to last forever".                              
 From issue 2534 of New Scientist magazine, 12 January 2006, page 12        
                                                                            



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