Mary Feldskov Saving seeds for the future Plant genetics are critical for global food security Home to polar bears, Arctic foxes, reindeer, and walruses, Svalbard, Norway, is a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. It is situated halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, and is one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, known for its dramatic, stark beauty and extreme conditions. ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER INDUSTRY NEWS 10 It is also home to the world's most diverse collection of seeds and genetic material: a “doomsday” collection of over 1.3 million seed varieties from around the globe, known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. GLOBAL COOPERATION The Seed Vault was the brainchild of Cary Fowler, who, named as head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in 2005, envisioned safeguarding the genetic diversity stored in gene banks around the world. “Gene banks, for a lay person, are a fancy word for freezers, in regular buildings,” says Fowler, who was the keynote speaker at the International Seed Federation Congress in Istanbul, Türkiye, in May 2025. Those ‘regular buildings’ are prone to all kinds of disasters—fire, floods, war. Fowler says he kept a file on his computer named ‘Gene Bank Horror Stories,’ documenting the irreplaceable loss of genetic diversity. “Every time something like this happened and it was an extinction event, we lost diversity, including unique diversity, including perhaps unique traits that a particular crop species might need in the future, and we lost it forever. It was gone like the dinosaurs.” HOW THE VAULT WORKS Svalbard, although remote, is an ideal location for such a facility. Built into the side of a mountain, the Vault, opened in 2008, measures 27 metres long, six metres wide, and six metres tall, and is accessible by a 100-metre-long tunnel. The seeds are stored in freezers at -18 °C, but even in the case of power loss, the permafrost prevents temperatures from rising above -5 °C. “[The seeds] would still remain frozen. And that would give us, according to our calculation, many months to get the repairman out to fix the equipment,” says Fowler. Funded by a global partnership between the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and international contributions from governments, gene banks, nongovernmental organizations, and private donors, storing seeds in the vault is provided free of charge to depositors. “It operates like a safety deposit box at the bank,” says Fowler. “Depositors send Cary Fowler at the International Seed Federation Congress in Istanbul, Türkiye, in May 2025, shows the footprint of the Global Seed Vault. Photo credit ISF.
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