The idea is that if some major disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout from a nuclear war, countries could turn to the vault to pull out seeds to restart food production as, the scientists claim, these can last there for another 10,000 years. Dubbed an “agricultural Noah’s Ark” or the “Doomsday vault,” the seed vault is the ultimate safety net for the world’s seed collections.
Pakistan is among the countries whose seed samples of food plants are already on the way to the vault. Other countries are Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, Syria, Nigeria, and Kenya. By the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from most of the world, drawn from collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), had begun being shipped to the island called Svalbard.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it is officially known, will hold duplicates of as many as 4.5 million seed samples, being the agricultural heritage of mankind, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, founded by the United Nations in 2004, is to maintain them there. The entrance to the fail-safe vault will gleam like a gem in the midnight sun, signalling a priceless treasure within. The site was chosen, in part, because the ground is perpetually frozen and would thus provide natural refrigeration to the seeds should electricity fail.
Its design covers the worst-case scenarios of global warming in two ways. One, the vault is located some 130 metres above current sea level and, hence, it will not be flooded. Two, it is placed an extraordinary 120 metres into the rock, ensuring that rising external air temperatures will have no influence on the surrounding permafrost. Even climate change over the next 200 years will not significantly affect the permafrost temperature.
The vault will be managed under the terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, which financed its construction, the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Nordic Gene Bank. An International Advisory Council will provide guidance and advice. It includes representatives from FAO, the CGIAR, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources and other institutions.
No doubt, crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected, but putting the seeds in freezers is not the answer. Only if farmers are allowed to use seeds in their organic form as they had been doing for centuries, the crop diversity, or bio-diversity, can be preserved. But the corporate sector is gradually taking over control of the crop seeds and creating hybrid varieties to sell them to farmers which not only kills the diversity factor but also makes them dependent on the companies. The world currently has 1,500 off-site gene banks but these have failed to save and preserve crop diversity.
The problem with the Svalbard vault is that it takes seeds of unique varieties (about 4.5 million) away from the farmers and communities who originally created and protected them and makes them inaccessible to them. To access these seeds, one must be fully familiar with the institutional framework and most farmers on the planet are simply unaware of that. In other words, the whole strategy behind the Svalbard vault caters more to the needs of scientists, not farmers.
Besides, experience shows that once the farmers’ seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else. Holding talks on intellectual property and other rights over their seeds is done by governments and the seed industry itself, not by farmers. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global gene banks, exercises a legal arrangement of “trusteeship” over the farmers’ seeds that it holds on behalf of the international community, under the auspices of the FAO. They never sought consent of the farmers when they took away their seeds and they left them totally out of the trusteeship equation.
But Svalbard vault, its organisers say, will be able to help replenish gene banks in case they are hit by natural disasters or suffer losses. In the past, some gene banks did come to the rescue of governments when such incidents occurred. Iraq’s gene bank in the town of Abu Ghraib was ransacked by looters in 2003. Fortunately there was a safety duplicate at the CGIAR centre in Syria. Typhoon Xangsane seriously damaged the Philippines’ national rice gene bank in 2006. The losses were replenished. After the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) used its collections to provide farmers with rice varieties suitable for growing in fields that had been inundated with salt water.
On September 10, 2002, scientists in Kabul reported the loss of two stores of carefully collected seeds. It was a looting of the worst kind. The seeds were dumped in disarray onto the floor of ransacked buildings in two cities. The looters merely ran off with the airtight plastic and glass jars in which the seeds had been kept. Now, about 3,000 varieties of Afghan agriculture have been deposited at a facility in Aleppo, Syria, which also keeps about 1,000 varieties from Iraq.
Because the Svalbard is a “doomsday” backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if it will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway’s history, even though the facility’s feasibility study assured that “there is no volcanic or significant seismic activity” in the area. But more disturbing, than any technical matter, is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by a few hands.
Under the arrangement finalised by the ‘international community’, the Norwegian government is ultimately responsible for the vault and is currently regarded as fair and trustworthy. But that the country’s policies can become unfavourable towards the vault at some point in future cannot be ruled out.
Incidentally, the Norwegian government itself is aware of this possibility and has provided agreements to be signed with depositors that last only ten years and that include clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change. However, Norway may not be making decisions autonomously; these will be more influenced by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a private entity with strong private and corporate funding.
Under the rules, seeds cannot be stored in the vault unless they come from gene banks that have successfully duplicated their samples in another bank. The Standard Depositor Agreement states that the “depositor shall deposit only samples of plant genetic resources that are, to the best of the Depositor’s knowledge, ... samples of plant genetic resources that have not yet been deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.”
As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at Svalbard, or give permission for someone else to. With parcels of CGIAR seeds already arriving in Norway, this means that the CGIAR centres will be the depositors for most of the seeds held in the vault, giving them almost exclusive control over access.
Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have registered with the vault so far, only three are national seed banks from developing countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR’s private stash.
In practical terms this means that many developing countries that want to duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able to do so directly. So, the ones to really benefit from the system will be the few transnational seed corporations that control over half the world’s $30 billion annual commercial seed market and which are increasingly buying public plant breeding programmes and governments are pulling out of plant breeding.