![]() My tour guide for the day, Brian Lainoff, a lanky thirty-something American, formerly the Crop Diversity Trust’s communications and partnerships coordinator, emerged with a group of potential funders from Switzerland. Just three small, mangy Svalbard reindeer pawing at the ice and snow, rooting for frozen lichen and grass. There were no armed guards at the vault entrance, no security checks. Instead, on March 4, it was a balmy -4 C. Normally, this far north in early March, Svalbard’s daily high would be about -20 Celsius. The roads were a curling rink thanks to a freak rain that had fallen the week prior. My hotel was only a few kilometres from the vault but walking there was out of the question. The entrance pokes out of the mountain at 50 metres above current sea level, high enough if-or when-the polar ice caps melt.Īfter an evening to get my bearings and indulge in some reindeer stew, Aquavit and Isbjørn lager, I hailed a taxi the next morning to make my 10 a.m. And because it is tunnelled deep into the mountainside, the three storage chambers can stay frozen for 25 years in the event of power outages. It’s engineered to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. It was built out of concrete to last for tens of thousands of years. ![]() Norway, with its neutral international reputation and no major stake in global agriculture, championed the idea of a secure backup vault and footed the $9 million construction costs for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2020. Only 87 percent of the collection was saved Once we have narrowed our options for economic reasons, what will we eat when those fewer varieties are no longer suited to changing climate conditions? The loss of genetic diversity-within everything from wheat, rice and corn, to potatoes, bananas and coffee-will make it more difficult to respond to the threats bearing down on global food production.ĭuring the civil war in Syria, one of the most important seed repositories in the world had to be evacuated. The enormous size of modern farms, with their economies of scale and cheaper unit production costs, means that more acreage is taken over by fewer crop varieties. The factors behind this trend are many and cumulative, but they include war, climate change, population growth, changes to farming practices, regional specialization in production in the global food economy, and, of course, proprietary seed concentration in a handful of multinationals. More than 50 percent of the western diet relies on the three big grasses of wheat, maize, and rice. It’s estimated that 90 percent of historic fruit and vegetable varieties in the US alone have vanished. In the 20th century, 75 percent of plant genetic diversity disappeared, as farmers around the world abandoned local heirlooms for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties. The United Nations reports that we are in the midst of an agricultural mass extinction, losing about one seed variety per day. Sowing the seeds of the future? Photograph: Crop Trust A beacon that begged the simple but somewhat fundamental question behind my visit: When the world builds a pantry in the permafrost and starts squirrelling away its most prized seed specimens, is this an exercise in over-preparedness or is there something about our food supply that we perhaps need to worry about? And I mean, really worry. It was remote and bunker-like, but hardly secretive. But flying into Spitsbergen, the seed vault’s concrete wedge entrance with its sparkly blue LED-lit cap was clearly visible from my airplane seat. It was hard to imagine a more difficult site to access. It had taken a year of back and forth with the guardians of this strange project to organize the visit, not to mention 5,000 kilometres of air travel from Edmonton to Reykjavík, then on to Oslo, Tromsø and, finally, Longyearbyen. Somehow, I had won the lottery, and had been received an invitation to tour the seeds from 12,000 years of agriculture’s past, present-and future. They were locked away in a mountainside on an island that is 60 percent glaciers and 100 percent in the middle of nowhere. Yet there I was, about to land at Longyearbyen airport, having been assured that if I made my way to the arctic archipelago of Svalbard in early March, I would be among a chosen few to gaze upon the frozen repository of the most important specimens of crop seed collections from around the planet. The BBC stated the Seed Vault was impossible to get into. Photograph: Crop TrustĪs my flight last spring neared its final destination of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen-which is dogsledding distance from the North Pole-I was reminded of a BBC article I’d read listing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as one of the world’s most secretive places, along with the Vatican Secret Archives and Area 51.
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