Seed Keepers

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

some ideas about the vault from Grain...the last two paragraphs, imo, 
are a more secure way to save/protect our seed. peace, bunkie.

Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard

GRAIN

http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36.

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.

On Tuesday, February 26, 2008, at 03:05 AM, kevin dudley wrote:

> Sorry Toni you have got me wrong its not the climate that is the 
> problem as landrace and non hybrid varieties in conjunction with the 
> observant grower can adjust and today with communication links like 
> this we are able to source even more for our local gene pools.
> After being involved in conservation of food crops for about 11 years 
> all the guys i work with agree that dissemination of seeds and 
> information is the only safe place that we know to protect the 
> abundance that is there and encourage even more genetic expression.
> Here in Europe we are defiantly being controlled and squeezed more and 
> more to fit in with the big seed companies,should we trust those who 
> put profit before the health of our people.
> We stay as happy as we can grow out seeds and plants,teach people how 
> to do it and despite the rain its a great life!
> Maybe the big fridge is a good idea but sooner or later it will belong 
> to someone who might not be able or want to give us the seeds!
> Mother Earth might want to flush the toilet hopefully some of us will 
> be up on the seat. Good luck Kevin<image.tiff>
<image.tiff>
> > To: seedkeepers@lists.ibiblio.org
> > CC: seedkeepers@lists.ibiblio.org
> > Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:27:19 -0500
> > From: tonitime@juno.com
> > Subject: Re: [Seed Keepers] Biodiversity NO seeds in the artic!
> >
> > Hi, Kevin the Seedsaver!
> > You are so right about seeds being in the right climate in the
> > earth!!!
> > BUT, the earth's climate has changed many times in the past, with
> > uncountable losses in varieties this lovely planet once contained. I 
> see
> > it as good insurance for all just in case Mother Earth does flush her
> > toilet before long ;-) According to many scientists, we are overdue 
> for
> > a flushing. Good for the planet, not so good for us!
> > Toni also the seedsaver
> > _______________________________________________
> > seedkeepers mailing list
> > seedkeepers@lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/seedkeepers
<image.tiff>
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