Seed Keepers

[Allan Balliett <aballiett@frontiernet.net>]

You would think that an edifice allegedly designed to preserve our 
genetic heritage would not allow the pilfering of genes to modify 
natural varieties. Guess what..... 
x-Posted by Allan Balliett Shepherdstown, WV

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/world/europe/29seeds.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food
Dean C.K. Cox for the International Herald Tribune

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: February 29, 2008

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway - With plant species disappearing at an alarming 
rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of 
plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources 
that may be needed for man to adapt the world's food supply to 
climate change.

This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near 
here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the 
middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault's goal 
is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed 
collection in the world.

As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of 
seeds - peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico - reside in this glazed 
cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case 
natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside 
world.

Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel 
to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and 
earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls 
temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort 
Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.

The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and 
systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate 
change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In 
Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples 
and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become 
extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A 
number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that 
can be stored.

For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed 
and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked 
corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot 
efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part 
because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part 
because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on 
world food production.

"We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of 
Hurricane Katrina," said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop 
Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. "Everyone was 
saying, why didn't anyone prepare for a hurricane before? We knew it 
was going to happen.

"Well, we are losing biodiversity every day - it's a kind of drip, 
drip, drip. It's also inevitable. We need to do something about it."

This week the urgency of the problem was underscored as wheat prices 
rose to record highs and wheat stores dropped to the lowest level in 
35 years. A series of droughts and new diseases cut wheat production 
in many parts of the world. "The erosion of plants' genetic resources 
is really going fast," said Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the division of 
crop biotechnology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, 
who has preserved half of the world's 1,200 banana types. "We're at a 
critical moment and if we don't act fast, we're going to lose a lot 
of plants that we may need."

The United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, 
ratified in 2004, created a formal global network for banking and 
sharing seeds, as well as for studying their genetic traits. Last 
year, its database received thousands of new seeds.

A system of plant banks could be crucial in responding to climate 
crises since it could identify genetic material and plant strains 
better able to cope with a changed environment.

Here at the Global Vault, hundreds of gray boxes containing seeds 
from places ranging from Syria to Mexico were moved this week into a 
freezing vault to be placed in suspended animation. They harbor a 
vast range of qualities, like the ability to withstand drier, warmer 
climate.

Climate change is expected to bring new weather stresses, as well as 
new plant pests into agricultural regions. Heat-trapping carbon 
dioxide emissions will produce not just global warming but an 
increase in extreme weather events, like floods and droughts, the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded.

Already three-quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the 
last century, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture 
Organization. Eighty percent of maize types that existed in the 1930s 
are gone, for example. In the United States, 94 percent of peas are 
no longer grown.

Seed banks have operated for decades, but many are based in 
agricultural areas and few are as high-tech or secure as the Global 
Seed Vault. They have often been regarded as resources for hobbyists, 
scientists, farmers and others rather than as a tool for human 
survival.

Their importance and vulnerability have become apparent in recent 
years. Seed banks in Afghanistan and Iraq were destroyed during 
conflicts in those nations, by looters who were after the plastic 
containers that held the seeds. In the Philippines, a typhoon bore 
through the wall of a seed bank, destroying numerous samples.

In reviewing seed bank policies a few years ago, experts looked at 
the banks in a new light, Dr. Fowler said: "We said, we may have some 
of the best seed banks in the world, but look at where they are: 
Peru, Colombia, Syria, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines. So a lot of 
us were asking, what's plan B?"

The goal of the new global plant banking system is to protect the 
precious stored plant genes from the vagaries of climate, politics 
and human error. Many banks are now "in countries where the political 
situation is not stable, and it is difficult to rely on 
refrigeration," Dr. Swennen said. Seeds must be stored at minus 20 
degrees Celsius, that is, well below freezing, and plants that rely 
on cryopreservation must be far colder.

"We are inside a mountain in the Arctic because we wanted a really, 
really safe place that operates by itself," Dr. Fowler said. 
Underground near Longyearbyen, just 600 miles from the North Pole, 
the seeds will stay frozen despite power failures. The Global Crop 
Diversity trust is also financing research into methods for storing 
genetic material from plants like bananas and coconuts that cannot be 
stored as seed.

The vault was built by Norway, and its operations are financed by 
government and private donations, including $20 million from Britain, 
$12 million from Australia, $11 million from Germany and $6.5 million 
from the United States. The effort to preserve a wide variety of 
plant genes in banks is particularly urgent because many farms now 
grow just one or two crops, with very high efficiency. Like purebred 
dogs perfectly tailored to their task, they are particularly 
vulnerable to both pests and climate change.

Scientists are also working to learn more about the skills encoded in 
the genes of each banked seed - crucial knowledge that is often not 
recorded. Ultimately, plant breeders will be able to consult a global 
database to find seeds with genes suitable for the particular climate 
challenge confronting a region - for instance, a corn with a stalk 
that resists storm winds or a wheat that needs less frequent water.

Just at a time when it is important to preserve biodiversity, 
economics encourages farmers to drop crops. But those seeds may 
contain traits that will prove advantageous in another place or 
another time. Scientists at Cornell University recently borrowed a 
gene from a South American potato to make potatoes that resisted the 
late blight fungus, a devastating disease that caused the Irish 
potato famine.

"You need a system to conserve the variety so it doesn't go extinct," 
Dr. Fowler said. "A farmer may make a bowl of porridge with the last 
seeds of a strain that is of no use to him, and then it's gone. And 
potentially those are exactly the genes we will need a decade later."