Climate Change Adds Urgency To Push to Save World’s Seeds
In the face of rising temperatures and worsening drought, the world’s repositories of agricultural seeds may hold the key to growing food under increasingly harsh conditions. But keeping these gene banks safe and viable is a complicated and expensive challenge.
During the 872-day German siege of Leningrad in World War II, in which an estimated 1.1 million civilians died, a small band of workers devoted themselves to safeguarding a priceless trove of 200,000 seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry. Then the world’s largest seed bank, the collection had been amassed, in large part, by famed Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov during expeditions to 64 countries.
As the siege wore on and starvation became epidemic, workers at the institute refused to eat the seeds and protected them from hungry citizens.
Nine of Vavilov’s seed bank colleagues ultimately died from starvation.
Seventy years later, in 2012, employees of a gene bank at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Syria (ICARDA), heroically duplicated irreplaceable wheat, barley, and lentil seeds and spirited them out of the battle-scarred country to the frozen Svalbard Seed Vault, located inside a Norwegian mountain. Last year, the vault was opened for the first time to retrieve those seeds in order to re-establish ICARDA’s gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco.
From war, to civil strife, to natural disasters, seed banks around the world face crises that, with surprising regularity, befall these genetic repositories that are the lifeblood of the international agricultural community. With 9 billion people to feed by 2050 and with crops facing increased stress from rising temperatures and drought, plant breeders must marshal all of the available crop diversity to continuously develop new varieties of wheat, maize, rice, and other foods.
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