June 5, 2019

By Gerelyn Terzo, WIA Media

NOTE: This story first appeared in the June 2019  issue, Volume 5, Issue 3, of the Women in Agribusiness Quarterly Journal, a sister publication to GAI News.

Seed banks harken back to the beginning of agriculture. Farmers have been preserving seeds from the threat of extreme weather and disease to the food supply for thousands of years. Should catastrophe strike, the seed inventory can be accessed to regrow food. While the methods and packaging have evolved over time, the motivation behind seed diversity is the same — to safeguard the world’s food source.

Seed banks not only represent the history of agriculture but the promise of the future, as well. That’s why it’s so frightening that the Arctic town housing the last line of defense for seed banks around the world is warming up.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the Doomsday Vault, is positioned between Norway’s mainland and the North Pole. Built by the Crop Trust and the Norwegian government and opened in 2008, it’s a global system that holds and protects approximately 1 million varieties of seeds. There are more than 1,750 gene banks around the world and Svalbard is a backup for all of them.

The massive structure is nestled in Norway’s mountain permafrost on Spitsbergen Island where it serves as a global backup for the national and international crop collections around the globe.

Only now the permafrost has begun to melt amid warming temperatures gripping the archipelago in which the small Arctic town is located. In fact, the warming here is more severe than anywhere else in the world. As a result, water has begun to seep into the 120 meters of tunnels leading to the doors that hold the precious seeds.

“From 1971 to 2017, a warming of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius has been observed … with the largest increase in winter and the smallest in summer,” according to Inger Hanssen-Bauer of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute as cited in the Washington Post.

The rising temperature is especially acute for Svalbard, where the average temperature is -8.7 degrees Celsius. “We know that the warming in this area has been very fast during the last five decades, seen in a global perspective,” Hanssen-Bauer noted.

Perhaps nobody knows this more than Marie Haga. As the executive director of the Crop Trust, Haga has a front row seat to the reality of climate change in the region. She told us:

“I have sleepless nights over the drama that climate change is. The weather is getting more unpredictable. It’s getting rougher — heat waves, cold waves. We have stronger winds. We have more storms. I think it should worry us a lot more than it actually does. It should worry politicians much more than it seems to.”

The U.S.’ intentions to withdraw from the Paris Climate deal later this year doesn’t help matters.

“The U.S. is a substantial contributor to the Crop Trust. And we appreciate that a lot. Having said that, there is no doubt that a changing climate — whether it is man-made or God made — is a tremendous challenge for security. And I think it’s fair to say that the main challenge for food security is that the crops that feed us are not able to adjust as fast as the climate is changing,” said Haga.

Crop diversity within species is needed to breed new plants to withstand changing weather conditions.

Among the 150,000 varieties of wheat, one variety might withstand higher temperatures while another can tolerate higher salinity in the soil. A third might have a higher nutrition value and a fourth might fight a new pest and a new disease.

“Each one of these varieties has different traits and that’s why we need to safeguard all of them,” said Haga. “We don’t know whether the challenges of today will be the same in five years or in 200 years.”

Crop Diversity

Crop diversity is woven into the knitting of the mission of the Crop Trust.  While chief among the threats to this mission is climate change, it’s not the only worry.

A tremendous amount of diversity has already been lost in the last 100-150 years. In the U.S. alone, for instance, more than 90 percent of the fruit and varieties from 1900 are gone. The reasons are two-pronged, owing to archaic agriculture methods and urbanization.

“That is extremely worrisome because for each variety we lose, we lose options for the future. What we do when we safeguard these crops is to safeguard options for the future. And when you lose 90 percent of fruits and vegetables in the U.S., it means you have fewer options.”

Developing countries are another concern, for a different reason.

“I am particularly concerned about the areas where many of these crops originate. You always have the greatest diversity from where the crops originate. And most of the crops come from developing countries. They have the least amount of resources to safeguard these materials. We’ve got to understand that this diversity is a global common good,” said Haga.

Funding is a concern, too.

“One would think it takes so much money to do this work. It really doesn’t. We have done constant studies. It takes $34 million a year to safeguard all of this material. Globally, I would say that is a very cheap insurance policy for the world,” exclaimed Haga.

The Crop Trust oversees an endowment fund built through generous financial contributions from many world governments and individuals. But it’s not enough.

“We would really like to see more private companies stepping up, especially those in the food and beverage sector – after all, their entire business models depend on some of these crops!,” explained Crop Trust’s Neil Palmer. “The target for our endowment fund is US$850 million; we’re currently around one-third of the way there.”

The dream of Svalbard is to have one copy of each unique variety of seeds in the global seed ark.

Entering the Halls of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The hope of the Crop Trust is that they never have to use the Svalbard Vault.

“If we have to take material out of it, it’s because something has gone wrong around the world,” said Haga.

For instance, when the Battle of Aleppo was at its peak, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) withdrew some of its seeds from the Seed Vault.

“When that material is lost, it’s lost forever. Unfortunately, things happen around the globe. And that can be war or it can be a national catastrophe like an earthquake or fire. And that’s why you need to have a backup,” said Haga.

ICARDA established gene bank operations in these countries too, so the seeds are grown and conserved there. Some of the seeds they withdrew have since been returned to the Seed Vault.

For Haga, the experience of walking into the highly secure Svalbard Seed Vault is a spiritual one that gives her the feeling of being in a cathedral. She explained:

“I’ve been there so many times. It catches me every time, knowing the seeds behind these doors are the history of agriculture and potentially the future of agriculture. This makes me humble.”