A Category 5 hurricane makes landfall, winds clocking in at 208 miles per hour. Eleven thousand die; there are $5 billion in damages; the region’s economy is set back 20 years. More bad news for the survivors: Crops, and therefore the food supply, have been destroyed. This isn’t a doomsday scenario: It happened in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch shredded large parts of Honduras and Nicaragua. But in a break with the usual devastating cycle of famine following a natural disaster, relief organizations worked with seed banks to supply farmers, saving lives and letting the agencies focus on problems like rebuilding the housing stock.

Seed banks don’t just store dried peas; they preserve our most precious resource, biodiversity. (You can’t eat petroleum.) The banks back up farmers and thus the food chain, minimizing the impact of catastrophic crop failures. Without seed banks, when a species is destroyed or a genetically modified variety has supplanted wild strains, farmers have no recourse if weather or pest infestation devastates their crops.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is raising $260 million to run the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which will serve as the backup’s backup. Starting in 2008, as many as 4.5 million samples from other banks will be preserved on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in icy perpetuity.

There are only two reasons a seed would ever leave this vault: (1) to be replaced by a fresh sample or (2) to reseed a crop that’s been wiped off the earth.