“The first package contained seeds originating from as many as 123 different countries.” Owned by the Norwegian government
Rice is probably the world’s single most important food crop, and the variations are enormous,” says Ola Westengen, operation manager at Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, the organization responsible for the day-to-day operations of the vault. The package was carried in by Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Nobel Peace Price winner Wangri Maathai.
The first deposit into the vault in February 2008 was a collection of rice seeds from the International Rice Research Institute. The frozen treasure is meant to be a bank of last resort, to provide backup should natural catastrophe, environmental damage or war deplete crop diversity. The millions and millions of seeds stored there range from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat and sorghum to European and North and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potatoes. The vault comprises swimming-pool-sized rooms carved into the frozen rock some 100 metres inside the mountain and accessible via a long tunnel. The seeds, boxes and boxes of them, are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on the main island of Spitsbergen, near the world’s northernmost village, Longyearbyen. Yet underneath the ice, snow and darkness lies one of the world’s largest seed collections. Co-funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, its mission is to conserve the planet's crop diversity for the food security of current and future generations, and the Government of Norway.Apart from glaciers and ice caps, little grows on Norway’s Svalbard islands, situated just south of the North Pole, and vegetation is sparse. Svalbard Global Seed Vault, currently holding over 860,000 food crop seeds from all over the world, is a back-up facility in the permafrost far north of the Arctic Circle.
#Norway adds seeds to its doomsday vault how to
Thanks to the Treaty, the Andean farmers learned how to pollinate their potatoes and collect seeds for storage, with some being deposited in Svalbard today. It aims to ensure farmers and researchers accessible to a large diversity of seeds and other plant genetic material - and a fair share of the benefits resulting from any new varieties. These seeds are made possible through benefit-sharing projects supported by FAO’s International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. “Agricultural biodiversity – like that locked inside the potato seeds being deposited here today – is essential to facing these challenges, by helping us develop better, more resilient crops,” said Mr. However, climate change, agricultural modernization, land-use changes, and diseases such as potato blight pose a critical challenge to this precious natural resource. Feeding over 1 billion people every day, the potato is low in fat with high protein, calcium and vitamin C.
The potato, originated in the Andes of South America, is now the world’s third-most consumed food. “In a few decades, our planet’s food systems will need to feed an additional 2 billion people,” said José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO), adding that “producing more and more nutritious food will be made all the more challenging as a result of climate change.”ħ50 potato seeds, as well as other wild potato relatives, were deposited by representatives of indigenous Andean communities from Peru, scientists from Costa Rica, FAO and Norwegian officials at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle.