Genetic Diversity Forever

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013, Cary Fowler, Charlotte Lusty and Maria Vinje Dodson, and Global Crop Diversity Trust, "The Youth Guide to Biodiversity" 1st Edition (Chapter 3) Youth and United Nations Global Alliance. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter 3.Verbatim. 

The Svalbard seed vault cut within the mountain in Norway.

© Global Crop Diversity Trust

Entrance to the Svalbard seed vault in Norway.

© Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Mari Tefre

Communities or individual farmers have been safeguarding their seeds and animal breeds since organised agriculture began. With a better knowledge of genetics and evolution, scientists began to recognise the significance of diversity and collect rare breeds and crop varieties. Today there is a worldwide network of institutes that conserves the seeds, roots and tubers of crops in genebanks.

Conserving seeds is more complicated than you might imagine. The easy option involves packing materials into airtight containers and storing them at low temperatures. For plants that don’t produce seeds, the materials are conserved as miniature plantlets in glass tubes in the laboratory or as tissue samples frozen to ultra-low temperatures in liquid nitrogen. In both cases, the materials may remain dormant for several decades although they still need to be checked regularly to ensure that they are not deteriorating.  

A genebank is not like a library where browsers can come and read the books or ask for particular titles or authors. You cannot tell from a seed how the plant will grow, whether it will deal with diseases or certain climates, nor how the harvested crop will taste. One of the most important aspects of genebanking is to test the plants and document meticulously their traits and characteristics. Genebanks keep thousands of samples. For instance, there are more than 250 000 entries for maize in different genebanks around the world. That is a lot of seeds to look through to find the maize that may work for you! 

The ultimate safe place for crop diversity is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Here, within the Arctic Circle dug into a frozen mountainside, safe from hurricanes, floods, electricity blackouts and wars, the genebanks of the world are depositing samples from their collections as a safety backup. So far, more than 500 000 seed samples are in storage. Whether these seeds will ever be needed is anyone’s guess. This diversity represents a multitude of options that we can provide to the people of the distant or maybe not-so-distant future.