Maywa Montenegro and Nikki Greenwood, “In Seeds We Trust,” Seed Magazine, June 9, 2009
This article examines the global food-security goals of Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and “intellectual father” of the Svalbard Seed Vault, which opened in February 2008 as a bomb-proof concrete bunker deep inside the sandstone of a remote Norwegian mountain north of the Arctic Circle. The vault, the authors write, was designed to store “copies of seeds currently housed in the more than 1,400 gene banks worldwide, so that should calamity strike any of those gene banks, Svalbard’s seeds would save the collections – and thus humanity – from the jaws of famine.”
But Fowler’s Rome-based Diversity Trust has an equally important project aimed at global food security, the authors write. They explain that because many national and international seed banks are vulnerable to floods, fires, earthquakes, and other natural hazards, as well as war, civil strife and “plain old poor maintenance,” the Diversity Trust has launched an ambitious rescue program for seed stocks. The program provides equipment, labor, training, and supplies for gene banks in some 70 countries to replant their samples, cull fresh seed, and update their records on approximately 100,000 samples. “Without these regeneration efforts,” the authors write, “a seed bank would be little more than a seed museum, a cache of curious but useless specimens.”
The authors report that Fowler and the Global Crop Diversity Fund, which was awarded $30 million by the Gates Foundation several years ago, is looking forward to a number of projects, including participation in a new central information portal that will eventually link all gene repositories in the world.
