Stocking the Seed Bank

From climate change to falling asteroids, the world's food supply faces many threats. But don't panic. Pomme frites, spaghetti, and fried rice are safe.

A huge "doomsday" seed vault deep in an Artic mountain in Norway officially opened on Tuesday, stocking the first 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries. The seed bank, which Conde Nast Portfolio wrote about in November, will serve to rebuild food supply on both a regional and global level should catastrophe strike and destroy crops

The first seeds introduced into the vault represent the world's remarkable diversity in carbs, from maize and rice barley and potatoes. But the overseers have not forgotten their vegetables: lettuce and eggplant seeds, among others, were also deposited.

Eventually, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it is officially known, will house the seeds of all of the world's known crops--about 1.5 million--reports the Financial Times.

Because this seed bank is meant to back up the host of local seed banks around the world, protective measures are tighter than a Bush official visiting Afghanistan. Besides typical security measures like key locks and blast-proof walls, the vault's location is as inhospitable as possible: The bank is built into a snowy mountainside of the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, some 500 miles from the North Pole.

Not everyone is pleased with this "service to the world" as the Global Crop Diversity Fund puts it. Grain.org fears this seed bank will mess with agricultural biodiversity. It contends:

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic is that as people's traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs -- seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population - the old ones have to be put away as "raw material" for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders.

Jennifer Lai