Seed Security

When we visited the Tsawwassen First Nation farm school a few weeks ago Catherine talked about the need for seed security… a fascinating subject that led us back to this gem in Norway.

Dubbed the “Doomsday Vault” the Svalbard Global Seed vault is dug 150m deep into a mountain with wild and old varieties of seeds lying in the deep freeze of the vault .

“There are as many as 1,700 versions of the vault, called gene banks, all over the world. This global network collects, preserves and shares seeds to further agricultural research and develop new varieties. The Svalbard vault was opened in 2008, effectively as a backup storage unit for all those hundreds of thousands of varieties. The idea was conceived in the 1980s by Cary Fowler, a former executive director of the Crop Trust, but only started to become reality after an International Seed Treaty negotiated by the U.N. was signed in 2001. Construction was funded by the Norwegian government, which operates the vault in partnership with the Crop Trust. The goal is to find and house a copy of every unique seed that exists in the global gene banks; soon the vault will make room for its millionth variety. It also works in tandem with those gene banks when their material is lost or destroyed.”

https://time.com/doomsday-vault/

This article by Jennifer Duggan highlights that only 30 crops provide 95% of human food-energy needs. Shocking. The loss of biodiversity over time as agriculture world-wide turns to mono-cropping is unnerving.