Unexpectedly, once started and yes anchored by Svalbard, the stage was set for a global network of repositories all tied to research facilities actively engaged in the whole challenge of preservation and yes even improvement. Careers are built of this now.
In the process the real security of seed libraries increases daily. I can see every high school been actively involved as well because it is part of putting local boots and eyeballs on the ground. I will also be easy to extend all this to insects as well.
So the unexpected consequence is a global infrastructure rather than a remote repository.
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A Worldwide Network of Seed Information Is Taking Root
Sunday, 13 September 2015 00:00
By Claire Provost, SciDev.Net | News Analysis
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32765-a-worldwide-network-of-seed-information-is-taking-root
As an increasingly bloody civil war raged around them,
a team of scientists in the Syrian capital Aleppo quietly packaged and
shipped a series of nondescript cardboard boxes to an island not far
from the North Pole. The boxes bore no sign of the conflict that had
surrounded them or the precious material they contained.
The scientists, from an International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)
research station, had carefully packed up thousands of samples of
barley, wheat, chickpea and other seeds: a treasure trove of genetic
diversity.
"It was extraordinary," says Ola Westengen, one of
the scientists’ Norwegian colleagues who received the seeds. Westengen
saw the seeds safely stored in a special vault buried in the permafrost on an Arctic archipelago. "These seeds are extremely valuable."
The samples from Syria now sit alongside hundreds of thousands of
others - sent by teams in countries from Burundi to Uzbekistan - at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, perhaps the most famous seed bank in the world.
Built to withstand anything from a nuclear strike to rising sea levels, the Svalbard Vault was a media sensation when it opened in 2008.
Its unique location, state-of-the-art facilities, and dramatic
ambitions led some to dub it the "Doomsday Vault". José Barroso,
then-president of the European Commission, called it a "frozen garden of
Eden".
Westengen, who was until recently coordinator of operations at the
Vault and now works at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences,
describes his colleagues’ work shipping seeds from Syria as "heroic".
But he is not entirely pleased with some of the publicity the Vault has attracted. "It's not a stand-alone project,"
he insists. "And it's not some kind of time capsule up there for
‘doomsday’, which is the impression you can get from some of the media
reports."
Instead, Westengen describes it as the "ultimate
back-up" for a vast network of seed banks around the world - including
the one at Aleppo. "You have to look at this as part of the larger
system. It's only as part of this system that it makes any sense."
A World of Seed Banks
Collecting and saving seeds is nothing new - it is as old as farming
societies themselves. But now this mission is the motivating force for a
growing contingent of scientists across the globe, engaged in what some
frame as a veritable race against time to conserve the world’s crop diversity before it is lost forever.
"We should look at crop diversity as we look at water
and air. This is a very fundamental natural resource," says Marie Haga,
a former Norwegian government minister who is now the executive
director of The Global Crop Diversity Trust, the international organisation that oversees the Svalbard Vault.
The Crop Trust was set up after The international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (sometimes called the "Seed Treaty") came into force in 2004. [1] Among other things, the treaty established a multilateral system to facilitate access to plant genetic resources, focussed on 64 priority crops.
Today more than seven million samples of seeds, tissues and other plant materials from food crops and their wild relatives are stored in an estimated 1,750 seed banks around the world.
Most of these were built in the last few decades, as scientists
worldwide sounded the alarm over growing threats to biodiversity and the
potential consequences this could have for future food security (The
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 per cent of global crop diversity was lost between 1900 and 2000).
But many of these repositories are located in risky environments. The national seed collection in Côte d’Ivoire was largely destroyed during the country’s civil war. In 2011 looters in Egypt damaged collections in both Cairo and North Sinai.
"In fact, any building on the surface of this earth is vulnerable
somehow and it’s a good idea to have a backup," says Westengen. "That’s
the role of Svalbard." The idea is that if existing collections are lost
or damaged, they can be replenished using what scientists call their
seeds’ "safety duplicates".
Today, more than 60 seed banks
globally have already sent samples to Svalbard. Since it opened in 2008,
its collection has more than tripled in size from just under 268,000
samples of everything from maize to radish to almost 840,000 by the end
of 2014.
Seedbanks Get Systematic
But some say the work has just begun. The Crop Trust, set up in 2004
as a financing mechanism to conserve the world's crop diversity, is
working on nothing less than what it calls "a global system of ex-situ
crop conservation".
In addition to the Svalbard Vault, this ‘system’ comprises nearly a
dozen international seed banks, housed within the research institutes of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
and organised around specific crops - such as maize and wheat in Mexico
or rice in the Philippines - plus more than a thousand national seed
banks and other collections scattered around the globe.
"Many
of these [local collections] are unfortunately in poor shape, and some
of these hold very important material" says Haga. "The biggest challenge
is to raise standards in the seed banks that need to be part of this
global system, and to fund this global system."
The Crop
Trust’s goal is to develop a structure that would allow the world’s seed
banks to maximise their resources by integrating their collections and
sharing detailed information about what they contain.
"There are way, way too many seed banks. There is a lot of duplicate
material," says Michael Koch, the Crop Trust’s director of finance.
"There certainly isn’t enough money for 1,700 collections but we don’t
need so many either."
How this streamlining will work in
practice is still being hammered out. In January, the Crop Trust held an
international meeting with different stakeholders to discuss how best
to build the "global, rational and cost effective system" it desires.
A draft strategy paper
discussed at the meeting estimates that there are likely 100 or so
"globally significant collections" of crop samples which should be
prioritised. Collections that receive the Crop Trust’s support to be
integrated into the global system will need to be accessible to
researchers and meet technical standards set by the organisation.
"Eligible institutions will receive long-term funding to manage
collections provided that they are able to maintain the standards set.
Additional funding will be sought and provided for additional activities
such as: adding to or improving collections or data; increasing the
availability of collections or data; backing up collections in Svalbard,
and so on," it adds.
But nothing is happening overnight.
Groups of experts are now working to identify collections to prioritise
and select which ones need help first.
And before any of this can be put into action, the Crop Trust still needs to answer the multi-million dollar question of how to pay for it.
Seed Funding
"There’s always this challenge of secure funding
for the long term. My seed might last for 200 years, but my money only
for two years. That’s the contradiction," says Jonas Mueller, senior
research leader at the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, at Kew Gardens
in the United Kingdom, which is working with the Crop Trust on a
multi-year project to collect and preserve samples of the "wild
relatives" of the world’s staple crops.
The aim of the Crop Trust is to secure funding to conserve crop diversity indefinitely. But they know this is a difficult ask.
"This is why the endowment was created - so we don’t need to go around
and beg for money every year," says Koch. The idea is that donors are
only asked to give once, with the endowment’s funding being invested so
that it is self-sustaining.
Koch is now working towards a 2016 pledging conference,
where dozens of countries will be asked to contribute towards the Crop
Trust’s immediate goal of raising the endowment to US$500 million. So
far, almost US$170 million has been paid in, more than 90 per cent of
that by governments.
"If we don’t meet this goal then we will
not have the resources in full to manage the crop collections and with
funding running out, I don’t know what would happen," says Koch.
This US$500 million would allow the Crop Trust to continue its current
work. But in order to expand and help finance the integration of
national and regional collections into this system, it says it will need
significantly more: for this, it’s looking to raise a further US$350
million (bringing the endowment to a total of US$850 million) by 2018.
The Local Bank
Outside Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, hundreds of dark, tightly
sealed jars are filled with seeds and stored on tall wooden bookshelves
at the Ejere community seed bank.
Regassa Feyissa, an
agricultural research scientist and former coordinator of the African
Biodiversity Network, explains that community seed banks like this offer
the chance to conserve genetic diversity at the level of local farmers
while also serving as grain reserves during hard times.
"We saw
at times of crisis how gene banks are not an immediate remedy - in part
because they store seeds in grams, small volumes," explains Feyissa.
Community seed banks, he says, store bigger volumes of seeds, and keep
them in farmers’ hands.
Yet the Crop Trust stresses that its
goal is not only to safeguard diversity but crucially to make it
available. In January it launched DivSeek, an initiative to
systematically catalogue the genetic makeup of banked seeds. The idea is
to open up local collections to researchers working on creating new
crop varieties anywhere in the world.
But some have raised concerns that researchers in developing countries may lack the computing power to crunch DivSeek’s data and so unless this infrastructure is improved, the creation of such databases may be of limited use to them.
Meanwhile, farmers’ organisations in developing countries are
increasingly sounding the alarm that it is getting harder for them to
conserve biodiversity at farm level in part because of laws and policies
that require that seeds to be registered in official catalogues in
order to circulate - requirements that small farmers may struggle to
meet.
"More than 80 per cent of all seed in Africa is produced
and disseminated through informal seed systems, that is, on-farm seed
saving and exchange between farmers," said Bridget Mugambe, policy
advocate at the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, in January. New legislation and strict marketing regimes
being introduced in some countries could effectively criminalise these
practices, she warned, spelling "disaster for our small family farmers".
When the Svalbard Vault first opened, the environmental organisation GRAIN
warned that it would give "a false sense of security in a world where
the crop diversity in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and
destroyed at an ever-increasing rate".
A focus on conservation
in seed banks is "fundamentally unjust", it added. "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." This strategy "caters to the needs of scientists, not
farmers", it concluded.
Haga says that while the Crop Trust’s
mandate is "ex situ" conservation, "my very firm view and conviction is
that we need to conserve crop diversity both in the field and in plant
genebanks." Both, she says, "are important and we should work on both in
parallel".
Syria is pointed to as an example of how today’s seed banks fit into a worldwide network,
and should not be seen as isolated treasure troves. At the ICARDA
research station outside Aleppo, scientists had started duplicating
their seeds for safe-keeping before the civil war broke out.
In
March, the scientists at the seedbank in Syria won the prestigious
Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize for their work rescuing and preserving
their collection. Accepting the award in Berlin on their behalf, Mahmoud
Solh director of ICARDA, said: it is "a resource we cannot afford to
lose".
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