The International Potato Center (CIP) recently joined 34 other organizations across the globe in depositing more than 60,000 seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a biodiversity bunker in a mountainside of an Arctic island in Norway. That mass deposit of seeds of an array of crops helped raise the number of samples stored in Svalbard to more than one million, but for the CIP genebank, it was just the latest such delivery in an ongoing effort to back up its extensive collections of potato, sweetpotato, Andean roots and tubers, and the wild relatives of those crops.
![Roughly the length of a finger, the insects fly together by the millions and devour crops. [Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]](https://storage.googleapis.com/cgiarorg/2024/04/Tiksa-Negeri-Reuters-640x428.png)