On Feb. 26, 2008, the most ambitious seed-bank facility ever constructed was inaugurated in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean only about 1,000 km (620 mi) from the North Pole. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), built by the Norwegian government into the side of a permafrost-covered mountain on the island of Spitsbergen, is designed to store in deep freeze the seeds of hundreds of thousands of plant varieties from crops grown on every part of the globe. This high-security “doomsday” conservancy, built far from unrest and civil war, seeks to protect the world’s agricultural inheritance against disaster, be it from rising sea levels, an asteroid strike, pestilence, or even the unforeseen consequences of an excessive reliance on crops with single-source genetic modifications.
Established as a backup facility, the SGSV accepts only seed samples that are already held by other seed banks. The deposits are managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organization that was established in 2004 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which operates international seed banks for the most important staple food crops. Seed samples for the SGSV are delivered and stored in sealed boxes and remain the property of the country or organization that deposits them. By late 2008 about 320,000 distinct seed samples, consisting of about 220 million seeds from about 2,900 plant species in more than 200 countries, had been placed in storage. The vault’s storage chambers are able to hold 4.5 million seed samples, for a total of 2.25 billion seeds.
Since the SGSV safeguards duplicate seed collections, it is not intended to replace any of the roughly 1,400 seed banks that exist worldwide. They include national and international institutions, organizations focused on particular types of crops, and regional facilities. In general, these seed banks are intended to preserve the genetic variety of plants, and for this reason they are also referred to as gene banks. Conserving crop varieties and related wild species provides genetic variations that can be useful for developing new varieties with essential traits, such as tolerating new pests or climate conditions.
Among the most important global seed banks is the Millennium Seed Bank (West Sussex, Eng.), which is managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Opened in 2000, the Millennium Seed Bank has succeeded in preserving virtually all of Britain’s 1,400 native plants and, in collaboration with seed banks in various other parts of the world, seeks to conserve a total of more than 24,000 plant species.
Seed banks that specialize in particular crops include the International Rice Genebank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in Los Baños, Phil., and the International Potato Centre (IPC), based in Lima. The IRRI, which was established in 1960, estimates that it has conserved about 100,000 varieties of rice. The IPC, which was established in 1971 and subsequently expanded to include other tubers of Andean origin, counts in its collections about 150 wild potato species.
An example of a regional seed bank is Native Seeds, which was founded in 1983 in the southwestern United States to help Native Americans locate seeds for growing traditional crops. One of the oldest crop conservancies in North America, it aims in part to make poor communities nutritionally self-sufficient. The organization’s seed collectors, often traveling to isolated areas by foot or muleback, have recovered seeds for some 2,000 varieties of plants, including amaranth, once widely used for food and fibre in Mexico; tepary beans, a favourite food of the desert peoples of the Southwest; orach, or “mountain spinach,” grown in the Rio Grande uplands of New Mexico; panic grass, once a rich source of grain and protein for the Indian peoples of southern California and northern Mexico; and a sunflower grown in the Grand Canyon by the Havasupai Indians—one that is completely resistant to a rust disease that has ravaged commercial sunflower crops.
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By selecting single hybrids, industrial agriculture (the source of the stock advertised in most commercial seed catalogs) has diminished the number of varieties of food plants available in the United States and other countries to all but a devoted handful of farmers and experimental gardeners. In the early 1900s, for example, more than 7,000 varieties of apples were grown commercially in the United States; today only a couple of dozen varieties are available to most consumers. The planting of monoculture crops, which increase standardization and efficiency, has replaced traditional crops in plots where they had been grown and bred for centuries. As a consequence, traditional crops, which had acquired the traits that are most suitable for the soils and climate of a given location, have been steadily lost. The preservation of this diversity of crops will help safeguard the future of the food plants upon which humans depend. Seed banks can directly address the concerns raised by a diminishment of genetic diversity among common food crops, and as plant scientists recover varieties of native food plants across the world, they add colour to a sadly washed-out genetic palette.