Seed Keepers

[ed&bunkie <bunked@centurytel.net>]

if this is the same group, this can't be good, right? peace, bunkie.

"Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic: Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the 
GMO giants know something we don’t

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529


One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He 
was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still 
a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the 
world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his 
Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto 
monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to 
a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to 
his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest 
‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 
billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on 
charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free 
charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, 
mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of 
shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into 
the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual 
budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some 
$30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth 
looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in 
one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing 
millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 
1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of 
rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see 
map).

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his 
millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, 
Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what 
is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the 
Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part 
of the Svalbard island group............



On Monday, February 25, 2008, at 05:57 AM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. 
wrote:

> BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Life in the cold store
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7262525.stm>
>
> Monday, 25 February 2008, 09:53 GMT
>
> This week sees the formal opening of a vault designed to protect and 
> preserve samples of valuable seeds. The "Doomsday"
> vault in Svalbard can store more than four million batches of seeds, 
> including the world's major crop varieties. BBC
> environment correspondent Sarah Mukherjee is in Svalbard for the 
> opening.
>
> Professor Tore Skroppa, director of the Norwegian Forest and Landscape 
> Institute
>
> Climate change is one of the reasons the vault has been created - but 
> by no means the only one.
>
> Professor Skroppa points out those more than 40 countries have had 
> some or all of their seed banks destroyed in recent
> years - whether through war, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, or through 
> floods or other natural disasters, as in the
> Philippines.
>
> _______________________________________________
> seedkeepers mailing list
> seedkeepers@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/seedkeepers