Seed Keepers

["ossi" <ossi@kulma.net>]

Hi, there's a new report about this doomsday fault.
(I introduce myself a bit later)

best wishes,
Ossi Kakko, Finland
ossi@kulma.net

###

New from GRAIN
February 2007
http://www.grain.org/nfg/?id=557
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36


FAULTS IN THE VAULT: NOT EVERYONE IS CELEBRATING SVALBARD

After months of extraordinary publicity, and with the apparently unanimous
support of the international scientific community, the "Global Seed Vault"
was officially opened today on an island in Svalbard, Norway. Nestled
inside a mountain, the Vault is basically a giant icebox able to hold 4.5
million seed samples in cold storage for humanity's future needs. The idea
is that if some major disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout
from a nuclear war, countries could turn to the Vault to pull out seeds to
restart food production. However, this "ultimate safety net" for the
biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move
in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the
dominant -- indeed, only -- approach to crop diversity conservation. It
gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity
present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an
ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague
the international ex situ system.

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS

Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and one of the
main proponents of the Vault, says that the initiative "will rescue the
most globally important developing-country collections of the world's 21
most important food crops." While it's true that crop diversity needs to
be rescued and protected, as irreplaceable diversity is being lost at an
alarming scale, relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer.
The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save
and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage,
as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the
seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have
been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened
throughout the ex situ system, not just in genebanks of developing
countries. So the issue is not about being for or against genebanks, it is
about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has
a lot of inherent problems.

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the
Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. 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. The logic is that as people's traditional
varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs -- seeds that are
supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population -- the old
ones have to be put away as "raw material" for future plant breeding. This
system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant
breeders. To access the seeds, you have to be integrated into a whole
institutional framework that most farmers on the planet simply don't even
know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ strategy caters to the needs of
scientists, not farmers

In addition, the system operates under the assumption that once the
farmers' seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and
negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the
business of governments and the seed industry itself. In the case of most
so-called public genebanks, the seeds are said to become part of "the
public domain" if not "national sovereignty" (which increasingly
translates to state ownership). The Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global genebanks for
the world's most widely used staple food crops, has even set up a legal
arrangement of "trusteeship" that it exercises over the treasure chest of
farmers' seeds that it holds "on behalf of" the international community,
under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers whom they
took the seeds from in the first place if this was okay and they left
farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.

The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty
architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these
problems. Because it is a "doomsday" backup collection, it raises the
stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the Vault will be
effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just
days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the
biggest earthquake in Norway's history, even though the facility's
feasibility study assured that "there is no volcanic or significant
seismic activity" in the area. But more troubling than any technical
matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands.

ACCESS AND BENEFIT ILLS

The Vault is not immune from the terrible controversies over access to and
benefits from the world's precious agricultural biodiversity. The
Norwegian government is ultimately responsible for the Vault and is
currently regarded as fair and trustworthy, but there is no guarantee that
the country's policies won't change. This is acknowledged by the Norwegian
government itself, which has provided agreements to be signed with
depositors that last only ten years and that include clauses allowing them
to be terminated if policies change. Probably more important, the
Norwegian government will not be making decisions autonomously. Decisions
will be shared with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a private entity with
strong private and corporate funding.

There are already some access issues with the Vault. For all practical
purposes, seeds cannot be stored in the Vault unless they come from
genebanks that have successfully duplicated their samples in another bank.
More than this, depositors are not allowed to put in seeds that are
already stored in the Vault. The Standard Depositor Agreement states that
the "Depositor shall deposit only samples of plant genetic resources that
are, to the best of the Depositor's knowledge, ... samples of plant
genetic resources that have not yet been deposited in the Svalbard Global
Seed Vault" and that "the Depositor recognizes the right of the Royal
Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food to refuse to accept samples for
deposit or to terminate the deposit of samples already deposited if the
samples constitute duplicates of materials already held in deposit in the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault".

As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at Svalbard,
or give permission for someone else to. With parcels of CGIAR seeds
already arriving in Norway, this means that the CGIAR Centres will be the
depositors for most of the seeds held in the Vault, giving them almost
exclusive control over access.  Indeed, as the Seed Vault feasibility
study indicates, it was "assumed that the [Vault] would begin operations
with a nucleus consisting of the CGIAR materials and those of certain key
national genebanks and that this (sic) 'founding collections' would
discourage subsequent unnecessary duplication of materials within the
Svalbard facility." Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have
registered with the Vault so far, only three are national seed banks from
developing countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just
anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR's private stash.

In practical terms this means that many developing countries that want to
duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able to do so
directly. It would be seen as a duplicate of what the CGIAR has already
deposited. They will not, therefore, have direct access to seeds in the
Vault that may have been collected from their country. This might not seem
to pose many concerns right now because governments have different backup
sources for seeds but the context would be vastly different under any
doomsday scenario where decisions would have to be taken over a critical,
unique resource which suddenly only remains in Svalbard. For farmers there
is pretty much no possibility for direct access to seeds in the Vault.

But doomsday aside, it is important to ask who really benefits from the ex
situ system that the Vault contributes to. As the few transnational seed
corporations that control over half the world's US$30 billion annual
commercial seed market are increasingly buying up public plant breeding
programmes and governments are pulling out of plant breeding, the ultimate
beneficiaries will be the very same corporations that are at the roots of
crop diversity destruction.

STOP DESTROYING DIVERSITY INSTEAD!

If governments were truly interested in conserving biodiversity for food
and agriculture, they would do two things. First, they would, as a central
priority, focus their efforts on supporting diversity in their countries'
farms and markets rather than only betting on big centralised genebanks.
This means leaving seeds in the hand of local farmers, with their active
and innovative farming practices, respecting and promoting the rights of
communities to conserve, produce, breed, exchange and sell seeds. But this
won't happen until governments turn agricultural policy and regulations
upside down and stop pushing for industrialisation and feeding
corporate-controlled global markets at the expense of letting farmers
freely feed their own communities and countries. This means making food
sovereignty the foundation of farm policy instead of continuously pushing
agriculture further down the destructive path of corporate-led global
market integration.

Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some hypothetic
emergency. The real urgency, however, is to let diversity live -- in
farms, in the hand of farmers, and across people-controlled and
community-oriented markets -- today.

=================================================

GOING FURTHER:

Aasa Christine Stoltz, "Norway's biggest quake hits Svalbard archipelago,"
Reuters, 21 February 2008.
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2173668320080221

Norwegian government and the Svalbard vault:
http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/

Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Svalbard vault:
http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=216

International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
http://www.planttreaty.org/

GRAIN, "The FAO seed treaty: from farmers' rights to breeders'
privileges," Seedling, October 2005.
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=411

Center for International Environment and Development Studies et al, "Study
to assess the feasibility of establishing a Svalbard Arctic seed
depository for the international community", prepared for the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, 14 September
2004.
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-vault/publications.html?id=463313

Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Standard Depositor Agreement.
http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?page=depositor_guidelines

=================================================

GRAIN, Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard, "Against
the grain", February 2007, http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36. Also
available in PDF format: http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36&pdf

Disponible en Español - http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=37

Bientôt disponible en français - http://www.grain.org/fr/


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26 February 2008
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