Repository of Agircultural Diversity

An editorial piece in the Hindu today reports the setting up of a repository of agricultural diversity in Norway.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the most comprehensive repository of the world’s agricultural diversity created in the remote island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic, is a symbol of humanity’s concern for its long-term future. The vault is the international community’s response to the many challenges to agriculture, the most formidable of which may be climate change. A global seed collection can help avert a catastrophic downturn in agriculture caused by conflict, war or climate change. By storing duplicate seed collections under optimal conditions — minus 18 degrees Celsius — the Svalbard vault built inside a permafrost-encased mountain offers some insurance against the loss of farm output. The facility has been funded and established by Norway near the village of Longyearbyen as a service to the world and opened recently with an impressive collection of 100 million seeds representing 268,000 distinct samples from over 100 countries. Eventually, the vault hopes to store 4.5 million samples. The existence of such a seed vault should reassure countries that are at risk of incurring terrible losses in agriculture due to strife or natural disasters. Indeed Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Rwanda are contemporary examples of countries that have suffered.

India has a major stake in the Svalbard seed vault programme. It maintains even now a seed bank of hardy dryland species of importance to Asian and African countries at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Andhra Pradesh. ICRISAT contributions to the global vault will ensure seed security for many countries; it will provide seeds containing about 110,000 germplasm accessions. The vital genetic resources available at ICRISAT helped Ethiopia and Rwanda replenish sorghum germplasm after debilitating internal conflict. Anticipating demands of a higher magnitude due to climate change in coming decades, seeds of resilient species — such as sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeon pea, and groundnut — and six small millets are being stored in the new vault, besides European, South American varieties. According to present calculations, the natural Arctic climate of Spitsbergen can keep the seeds safe, it is assumed, even in the worst climate change scenario; in the normal course, the vault is kept at very low temperatures through artificial cooling. Some seeds can be viable for as long as a millennium. At a time when monoculture and commercial pressures on food production are blamed for the loss of diversity in food crops, it is a refreshing effort at preservation of variety.