ICARDA had sent duplicates of 80% of its seeds to Svalbard. To date, the only institution that has returned to its deposit at the bank has been the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), after 148,000 varieties stored at its warehouse in Aleppo, Syria, were destroyed as a consequence of the civil war. ![]() Since it was opened, more than a million varieties of seeds have been deposited by 86 countries and institutions, representing nearly 6,000 species. The facility has been constructed to withstand volcanic eruptions and earthquakes measuring up to 10 on the Richter scale, and the surrounding area has been declared a demilitarized zone. ![]() It is financially supported by the FAO, together with institutions and foundations such as the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Annual maintenance comes in at around €1 million. The World Seed Vault is owned by the Norwegian state and required an initial investment of €9 million, to which another €20 million was added to eliminate humidity. The seeds – about 500 per batch and dehydrated to 5% humidity – are kept in envelopes wrapped with several layers of aluminum foil and stored in boxes upon which their species and other information is recorded. The facility is spread over an area of about 1,000 square meters, divided into various different chambers, with almost no light. It is located 130 meters inside an old sandstone mine and 130 meters above sea level, with constant temperature of -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4☏). The Noah’s Ark of seeds aims to ensure its stock maintains useful permanence for two centuries, even if its refrigeration units fail. Although there were many candidates to host the facility, in 2008 it was decided that it would be built in Svalbard. Esquinas was one of the driving forces behind the initiative to build a depository for the protection of seeds and biodiversity. José Esquinas, an agricultural engineer and genetics expert, joined FAO in 1978 where he has served as Secretary of the Intergovernmental Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for 30 years. In this sense, the World Seed Vault acts much like a safe does in a bank. As such, the FAO put forward the idea of creating a world seed bank where all the associated global institutions, some 1,500 of them, can store a backup copy of their varieties with access to them whenever necessary. This massive dependency on so few species, together with the progressive erosion of biodiversity based on a foundation of thousands of traditional species, sparked concern in the 1980s among international organizations such as the FAO and the World Bank, who recognized the need to safeguard the availability of seeds to ensure food supply for a world population that stands at eight billion people today, but which is expected to rise to 10 billion by 2050. Of that number just nine - sugarcane, maize, wheat, rice, potato, soybean, palm, beet and cassava - account for two thirds of the world’s total food production from agricultural activity. However, global food supply essentially comes from about 200 seeds. ![]() On paper, there are over 400,000 species of vascular plants – those with roots, stems and leaves – of which only between 8,000 and 10,000 have been used over the centuries for food production. In the case of plant species, over the same timeframe 75% have disappeared and two out of every three are in danger of extinction. The objective of this storage facility is to ensure that humankind can continue to produce food in the event of a catastrophe.Īccording to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), of 6,300 livestock breeds catalogued on Earth during the 20th century, only 1,300 have survived. Officially it is called the Svalbard World Seed Vault, and it holds over a million varieties of 6,000 plant species that grow in every climate and on every continent on the planet. Just 800 miles from the North Pole, on the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, underground and bombproof, is a facility that has been dubbed the bunker at the end of the world, or the Noah’s Ark of seeds.
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