The Seeds of Our Future

Hi everyone! It's been a long time since I've posted anything; with summer and school starting, I've just found myself running late on everything. I promise posts will become slightly more regular, but to quick off the new school year, here's my most recent article. Enjoy!

---

By Gemma Tabet

Written: October 22nd, 2021

Theme of Issue: SDG 2, Zero Hunger. Here is the official UN link where you can learn more about this particular Sustainable Development Goal: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal2

---

"Light on Global Seed Vault" by Cao Jiahui via 500px

---

The end of the world. It’s an idea that humanity has faced throughout time: the ominous ending of the Mayan calendar in 2012, the Great Flood of 1524, countless ‘world-destroying' asteroid and comet scares, the zombie apocalypse; it’s a topic that’s been broached in almost all religions and beliefs. And for non-believers, one can turn to the arts, where film directors, authors, and painters have all tried to imagine dystopian, grey, worlds: some in the far future, and some not. In most of these cases, the end of the world happens because humanity goes too far, turning on itself as either our technology slips out of control, our secret experiments create nightmarish monsters or our reckless expeditions to space bother some aliens. The world always ends in the span of twenty-four hours, where in one single day all land is either swallowed by a giant tsunami, run over by zombies, or engulfed by the flames of a dark creature. One single cataclysmic event and most of the population is wiped out.

The most likely scenario will take more time: a series of events in the coming years that will make life harder for millions, as it’s already doing currently for many. Climate change will not hit Earth in the span of a day; it has been coming in waves for decades now. Today we see the effect of our irresponsible use of fossil fuel and deforestation with the rise of natural disasters, and mass flora and fauna extinction. Yet, unlike in the movies, humanity still has an invaluable resource. Time. We are still in time to develop technologies and solutions to deal with specific scenarios, and one such safeguard comes in the form of the Global Seed Vault.

The Global Seed Vault is a huge safety deposit bank, home to the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity, and can be found in the cold of Svalbard, island archipelago above the Arctic Circle, between the North Pole and Norway. It was created in case of a global food crisis, a challenge the world has is facing today. More and more organic crops no longer yield enough food to sustain growing populations; scorched by the hot sun, or helpless against extreme, unpredictable weathers. Where once stronger varieties might have survived, a 93% drop in seed and grain varieties since the early 20th century makes this impossible. Without this crop diversity, crops are not able to adapt to changing climates and populations, and the rise in monoculture (the practice of growing one crop species in a field at a time) robs the land of essential nutrients, requiring the need of chemical fertilizers as self-sustaining harvest cycles come to a stop. These crops are now more susceptible to plant diseases and droughts, unable to rely on stronger varieties to carry on the species.

The Global Seed Vault aims to solve this. Nicknamed, the ‘doomsday’ vault, its main objective, apart from aiding in a global catastrophe, is to provide back-ups to the original samples in gene banks around the world: gene banks more vulnerable to natural disasters, mismanagement or human conflict due to their locations. Today, it contains back-ups of over 40% of the world’s seed collections, with samples of more than 5,000 plant species and 1.2 million varieties, stored in airtight aluminum pouches placed in carefully labeled boxes: the exact picture of a dystopian laboratory deep in the underground ice.

The idea of a vault holding seed duplicates came around in the 1980s by Cary Fowler, American agriculturalist and former executive director of the Crop Trust, an NGO with headquarters in Germany, working to ensure the future’s food security by preserve crop diversity. In 2001, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) which called for a global system for plant genetic resources, was signed and passed by countries around the world (today it has 149 country signatories). By 2004, Norway agreed to build and fund the Global Seed Vault, and on February 26th 2008, the gene bank was opened in the presence of the leaders of Norway, the European Union, and United Nation’s FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization), as well as Nobel Prize laureate Wangari Maathai.

The importance of the Global Seed Vault is indisputable. It’s a fail-safe in the case of the most extreme catastrophe and is a symbol of what countries can do together once they set their politics aside to save the future. The latest deposits on October 12th, 2022, arrived from first-timers Iraq and Uruguay, along with a dozen gene banks from Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America, delivering a total of 45,368 seeds with the presence of 50 ambassadors. It’s a warm reassurance as recent floods in Pakistan and the global grain shortage are a reminder of the vulnerability of the food systems we rely so heavily on. But the Global Seed Vault can solve this, as events in Syria showed.

ICARDA, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, houses the largest collection of crop diversity from the Fertile Crescent, and was based outside of Aleppo, Syria. When the Syrian civil war broke out, the organization was forced to evacuate most of its staff by 2012, with some brave Syrian researchers staying behind to rescue equipment and some of the oldest varieties of wheat and barley. They managed to prepare and ship 83% of their accessions to the Seed Vault by 2014. In 2015, ICARDA staff returned to Svalbard to make the first-ever withdrawal from the Global Seed Vault, bringing their seeds to new headquarters in Lebanon and Morocco. The seeds were defrosted and planted there, and their offspring was collected and placed into the new gene banks. ICARDA then returned the varieties of seeds they had taken out of the Seed Vault; concrete evidence that this circular system of preserving diversity works.

Gene banks around the world have suffered similar threats: with the destruction of vaults in Afghanistan and Iraq, housing seeds and grains without back-ups in Svalbard, and that of the Philippine’s national gene bank, which was damaged by flooding from a typhon, and later by a fire. Even the Global Seed Vault itself isn’t completely impervious to natural disasters.

In 2017, to the shock of the world, the Vault was breached by meltwater gushing into the entrance of the tunnel. Luckily, no seeds were damaged, resulting in only an expensive repair bill, but raised questions on the ability of a vault supposed to thrive without any human aid. The disturbance came with, unsurprisingly, a record-hot year in 2016, leading to heavy rains instead of soft snow. In fact, 2016 saw average temperatures 7°C above the norm in the Svalbard archipelago: incredibly dangerous to the Vault’s need of being kept at -18°C to keep the seeds and grains frozen. Studies show that between 2071 and 2100, average temperatures in the archipelago will increase by 7-10°C, only a small part of an occurrence impacting the entire Arctic, which is currently warming twice as fast as the entire planet.

The Global Seed Vault stands as proof of the need of selfless solutions made by nations worldwide to provide a fail-safe for the worst-case scenarios. The Vault protects critical grains and seeds that ensure the Earth’s crop diversity is not lost. The world is facing a global food crisis, one that may worsen with further economic hardships, and in this moment of uncertainty, nations should only work closer with one another to make sure the Vault and other gene banks are provided with the necessary funds to achieve SDG 2, ‘Zero Hunger’. But more importantly, recent events at Svalbard also show the necessity of combating climate change with hands-on solutions to protect not only the populations of today, but the seeds for the generations of tomorrow.