- #WHEN DID SYRIA ASK TO ACCESS DOOMSDAY VAULT FULL#
- #WHEN DID SYRIA ASK TO ACCESS DOOMSDAY VAULT PLUS#
If you look at cumulatively, they occupy more land than is used for growing rice on the planet. Why are these “ minor” crops important, if the “ major” ones are covered? How can crops adapt if we don’t have large collections of diversity, and we don’t have a mechanism for getting diversity into the hands of plant breeders or farmers?
#WHEN DID SYRIA ASK TO ACCESS DOOMSDAY VAULT PLUS#
Climate change is obviously already causing migrations of pests and diseases, plus giving us new and more variable weather. There’s not as much plant breeding going on for those crops, or none, save what farmers are consciously or inadvertently doing by saving seeds year after year. The gaps I most worry about are the more minor, or underutilized, crops. But evolution continues, and diversity is not a fixed quantity. We’re getting to the point where we’re seeing diminishing numbers of incoming samples of some major crops. A lot of people say, “How many people work up there?” And I say, “Zero.” On a per sample basis, the Seed Vault is cheaper than any other seed bank in the world. , it had to be simple and sustainable and cheap to run, so we couldn’t have labs up there, or import liquid nitrogen from across the ocean. With the Seed Vault, we stuck to what we knew we could do. The Crop Trust is overseeing individual efforts around the world to protect those kinds of crops, so that work is being done, too. That facility is designed for the sole purpose of conserving seeds.ĭo you feel that protecting non-seed crops is something the Vault should have planned for? Sometimes people say, “Could you do those things at Svalbard?” No, not really. There are also crops whose diversity can’t be conserved through raising seeds, so there have to be other mechanisms for preserving them, ranging from field collections-having plants in fields that are tended-to tissue culture to the cryopreservation of tissue in liquid nitrogen. There will always be diversity we don’t have in the Vault. As far as humanly possible, we’ve put an end to the extinction of crop diversity with what we have stored there. What we’ve managed to do is collect a significant portion of the diversity, certainly of major crops in terms of cereal grains. Would you call the Seed Vault a “ success” so far? I wanted to put her photographs out there so everyone could see breadth of the project.
Mari Tefre is the only photographer who was there at beginning she lived and covered the building of the Vault from start to finish.
#WHEN DID SYRIA ASK TO ACCESS DOOMSDAY VAULT FULL#
There’s been a lot of media attention around the Seed Vault, but at a certain point, it occurred to me that the full story hadn’t been told. What was the impetus for putting it together now? Seeds on Ice was just published in September. climate strides in danger of being unraveled and the future of our agricultural policy uncertain, Fowler discusses his new book about his work on the Vault, Seeds on Ice, what the Vault has managed to accomplish to date, and what work still remains to done. The creation of the Vault was undertaken by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (now The Crop Trust), under the directorship of Cary Fowler, who has been a tireless advocate on behalf of food security for decades. To date, this one-of-a-kind facility-its location chosen partly because of its year-round cold temperatures-has received more than 860,000 seed samples from around the world. Its mission? To preserve as much of the world’s crop diversity as possible, in order to ensure that our agricultural systems remain viable as climate change and other instabilities close in around us. Since 2008, deep inside a mountain on a permafrost-crusted archipelago near the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been open for business, soliciting and accepting sample seed collections from partner seed banks around the globe.
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