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Thousands of Crop Varieties from Four Corners of
the World Depart for Arctic Seed Vault
For more information, please contact:
Jeff Haskins at +1 301 652 1558 or
jhaskins@burnesscommunications.com or
Megan Dold at +1 301 652 1558 at
mdold@burnesscommunications.com
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Seeds Contributed by Global Network of
Agricultural Research Centers Considered
"Crown Jewels" of Crop
Diversity
MEXICO CITY (23 January 2008)-At the end of January, more than
200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the
Middle East-drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR)-will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle,
where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV),
a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of
years.
The cornucopia of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes,
lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and
agroforestry plants is to be safeguarded in the facility, which was
created as a repository of last resort for humanity's
agricultural heritage. The seeds will be shipped to the village of
Longyearbyen on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, where the vault
has been constructed on a mountain deep inside the Arctic
permafrost.
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Video: Watch how IRRI staff prepare for the
shipment to Svalbard :
Photos:
Click here to view
photos of the seed transfer operation.
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Background information from Centers on
shipments to Svalbard Global Seed Vault:
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The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to
the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the
Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault
will open on February 26, 2008.
This first installment from the CGIAR collections will contain
duplicates from international agricultural research centers based
in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru,
the Philippines and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain
600,000 plant varieties in crop genebanks, which are widely viewed
as the foundation of global efforts to conserve agricultural
biodiversity.
"Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive
array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work
of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to
ensuring the survival of the world's most important crop
species," said Emile Frison, Director General of Rome-based
Bioversity International, which coordinates CGIAR crop diversity
initiatives.
"The CGIAR collections are the 'crown jewels' of
international agriculture," said Cary Fowler, Executive
Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will cover the
costs of preparing, packaging and transporting CGIAR seeds to the
Arctic. "They include the world's largest and most diverse
collections of rice, wheat, maize and beans. Many traditional
landraces of these crops would have been lost had they not been
collected and stored in the genebanks."
For example, the wheat collection held just outside Mexico City
by the CGIAR-supported International Maize and Wheat Improvement
Center (CIMMYT) contains 150,000 unique samples of wheat and its
relatives from more than 100 countries. It is the largest unified
collection in the world for a single crop. Overall, the maize
collection represents nearly 90 percent of maize diversity in the
Americas, where the crop originated. CIMMYT will continue to send
yearly shipments of regenerated seed until the entire collection of
maize and wheat has been backed up at Svalbard.
Storage of these and all the other seeds at Svalbard is intended
to ensure that they will be available for bolstering food security
should a manmade or natural disaster threaten agricultural systems,
or even the genebanks themselves, at any point in the future.
"We need to understand that genebanks are not seed museums
but the repositories of vital, living resources that are used
almost every day in the never-ending battle against major threats
to food production," Bioversity International's Frison
said. "We're going to need this diversity to breed new
varieties that can adapt to climate change, new diseases and other
rapidly emerging threats."
Why are genebanks important?
The CGIAR collections are famous in plant breeding circles as a
treasure trove for plant breeders searching for traits to help them
combat destructive crop diseases and pests, such as the black
sigatoka fungus, which is devastating banana production in East
Africa, and grain borer beetle, which is destroying maize in
Kenya.
Just from January to August of 2007, CGIAR centers distributed
almost 100,000 samples. The materials mainly go to researchers and
plant breeders seeking genetic traits to create new crop varieties
that offer such benefits as higher yields, improved nutritional
value, resistance to pests and diseases, and the ability to survive
changing climatic conditions, which are expected to make floods and
drought more frequent.
In addition, these collections have often been used to help
restore agricultural systems after conflicts and natural
disasters.
For example, among the 135,000 food and forage seeds maintained
at the CGIAR-supported International Center for Agricultural
Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria, 3,000
varieties are native to Afghanistan, and 1,000 are from Iraq. The
seeds preserved have been used to help revitalize crop diversity in
these war-torn regions.
"Svalbard will be able to help replenish genebanks if
they're hit," said Cary Fowler. Iraq's genebank in the
town of Abu Ghraib was ransacked by looters in 2003. Fortunately
there was a safety duplicate at the CGIAR center in Syria. Typhoon
Xangsane seriously damaged the genebank of the Philippines national
rice genebank in 2006. "Unfortunately, these kinds of national
genebank horror stories are fairly common place," said Fowler.
"The Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes the CGIAR's genebank
collections safer than ever."
After the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004, the CGIAR-supported
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. The genebank at the
CGIAR-supported International Center for Tropical Agriculture
(CIAT) in Palmira, Colombia was instrumental in providing bean
varieties to farmers in Honduras and Nicaragua in the aftermath of
Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
According to Geoff Hawtin, Acting Director General of CIAT and
former executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity
Trust, "The shipments going to Svalbard from the CGIAR
genebanks are a vital measure for further safeguarding the
world's crop collections. With coming climatic changes, higher
food prices, and expanding markets for biofuels, our best available
options for progress, if not survival, will be in what we have
conserved and studied against all thinkable predictions."
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Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (www.cgiar.org)
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR), established in 1971, is a strategic partnership of
countries, international and regional organizations and private
foundations supporting the work of 15 international agricultural
research Centers. In collaboration with national agricultural
research systems, civil society and the private sector, the CGIAR
fosters sustainable agricultural growth through high-quality
science aimed at benefiting the poor through stronger food
security, better human nutrition and health ,
higher incomes and improved management of natural resources.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust
(www.croptrust.org)
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and
availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to
the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity
is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide
to solve this problem.
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