LAST week a massive tunnel in the Arctic named the ‘Doomsday Vault’ was announced. Essentially a giant refrigerator, it has been created to preserve millions of seeds from around the world.

Although, the cellar made global headlines for its size and scope, it was forgotten immediately after the great launch. In Pakistan and most other places, people were too overwhelmed or preoccupied by their immediate economic and political problems to notice.

News came from only a few consolidated sources, and details were scanty. There was opposition by NGOs and farmers’ movements, which was consistently ignored by the mainstream media.

On the surface, the undertaking appears innocuous. The vault’s stated purpose is protection against possible nuclear or other disasters that could destroy an entire region or even the world. In that unlikely event, survivors will not have to die from an agricultural collapse. They will be able to immediately source seeds from the vault to start food production all over again. At least that is the theory. Faulty, though.

Will there be enough indigenous seeds in the vault to help jumpstart an entire region or even one country within several seasons? No, there aren’t. All seeds would not apply in all areas. While natural disasters can devastate vast acreages, they have not been known to completely destroy all life including humans, making the whole vault exercise seem fruitless. So why did over 200 governments and territories swallow the story and contribute?

It’s not the first time that ignorance has led to questionable choices. Nor the first time for decision-makers to knowingly or unknowingly play to the tune of global commercial interests. Since the food crop itself is its own seed, such as rice, wheat, maize, or is contained within the plant, it’s been easy for farmers to save seeds. The diversity is mind-boggling; each plant coming not in dozens or hundreds of varieties but in thousands of species. Thus there are 40,000 rice varieties in a 200-mile belt of central India alone, 10,000 wheat varieties in China, 1500 banana varieties, a thousand kinds of Peruvian potatoes and most of these are disappearing due to disuse in the 21st century.

Such diversity is a result of plants adapting to a vast range of environmental conditions; where nature occurs at its richest, varieties of the same plant appear every mile or so and respond to the minutest local variations and proportions of combined factors, even at different heights within the same forest. Biodiversity therefore offered people crops specific to their own niche, which in turn were cross-bred with neighbouring plant relatives to obtain the best.

Modern agriculture was directly responsible for destroying biodiversity. Traditional farmers planted between a few dozen to a hundred crops in the same field not only because combined productivity was several times higher than monoculture but also because health and renewability were guaranteed. But when ‘industrial’ farming methods started putting single crops in a field where many already existed, millions of the removed species were rendered extinct. Deceived by a higher but short-lived output, the entire world allowed this system to engulf it. Three-fourths of the world’s diversity was lost. What survives is only because valiant farmers have stubbornly struggled to maintain it.

The unfortunately named Doomsday Vault is not the first gene bank, although it is the first of its kind. Gene banks were started by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a subtle amalgamation of international and private institutions. In effect, they only served commercial organisations seeking raw material. CGIAR ran 15 global gene banks for the most common staple food crops as a ‘trusteeship on behalf of the international community’ –– although the communities were never asked permission or compensated for what they had selected, developed, and shared among themselves over generations and centuries.

Vault rules claim that only depositors or a private or commercial organisation authorised by them can access their own collections. But the fine print does not allow access to hands-on farmers. The justification is that as traditional varieties get replaced by newly-developed ones, which only emerge from corporate laboratories, the traditional, natural varieties should be stored away for sourcing fresh genes.

Yet farmers are not encouraged to save self-grown seed in its own habitat! That would not serve the handful of seed multinationals already controlling over half the world’s US$30bn annual commercial seed market. The benefit goes to scientists serving corporations, not farmers. In other words, intellectual property rights can only be negotiated between governments and the seed industry. The entire mechanism is so elaborately blanketed with humanitarian rhetoric that it is easy to fool the non-agricultural mind.

The sheer logistics and legal restrictions involved simply cannot grant easy access to developing countries. It would have made more sense and been far more economical to support small indigenous farmers to cultivate and save more indigenous seed locally. For traditional farmers, the safest and healthiest seed bank has always been ‘in situ’ or on site within the native environment.

There are some 1500 ‘ex situ’ or ‘off-site’ seed banks around the world, mostly failing for lack of funds or the wrong approach. Only three of the 19 depositor institutes – all of CGIAR – registered with the vault, are from the Third World. They have often been accused of simply being conduits for multinational seed corporations.

After all, what followed was that many Western companies, especially American, were inserting a token gene or two from other species and patenting native varieties as their own exclusive property. Previously, seeds in most so-called gene banks were part of the ‘public domain’ which made them easy to access. How else did outsiders get to patent native South Asian varieties such as ‘Neem’, turmeric, basmati rice and much more?

Within three decades, the campaign for an ex-situ ‘world gene bank’ has succeeded. But the ‘in-situ’ campaign by farmers’ movements over the past half-century, which calls for on-farm strategies, continues to be ignored. Pakistan, where biodiversity is severely threatened, has made generous seed contribution to the vault – without parliamentary or public debate on sovereign public goods, not even with farmers.

What is the need, for example, to deposit 15,000 unique varieties of cowpeas, already being cultivated over 600 million acres and vital to the food security of 88 developing countries, in an isolated icebox? Perhaps it is because of their combined value of $100bn which is not in corporate hands yet?

Norway is one of the few countries the world would trust with sovereign seeds. The same cannot be said for the other actors. Norway is funding the entire construction as a global service. But the money trail for the maintenance of the vault and other services leads chillingly to the same institutions that imposed chemical and GM monoculture, bringing social and environmental devastation in their wake. These include the several Rockefeller foundations and Ford Foundation, which already control most of the world’s private seed banks, USAID, the world’s four biggest multinationals in seeds and agro-chemicals, and now the Bill Gates Foundation as well.

Eight days before the ‘Doomsday Vault’ opened formally, the archipelago where it is situated was hit by an earthquake of 6.2 magnitude, the most intense in Norway’s history. However, the feasibility study claims that there was ‘no volcanic or significant seismic activity’ in the area. Was Nature showing its disapproval on behalf of the billions who wouldn’t dare?