The main environmental news of the last month was the Svalbard Seed Bank.
Svalbard, a bunch of islands off the North of Norway, is cold. Really, really cold. The idea is that this dark and desolate natural freezer is the perfect place to store the world's botanical heritage. Great.
Well, no. Some environmental dissenters are saying it isn't so great. For a start, Svalbard is an extremely fragile ecosystem. According to scientists at the University in Svalbard:
High Arctic terrestrial ecosystems in general, and Svalbard ecosystems in particular, are robust in terms of temporal variation in herbivore populations and climate, but are fragile in terms of human disturbance and other human interference." -- UNISThe islands could also be dramatically affected by climate change, which some scientists suggest has reached a tipping point in the arctic. Not to mention the years of mining by both Norwegian and Russian companies. It is therefore legitimate to consider the damage caused by constructing and maintaining the vaults and the greenhouse gases used to transport 4.5 million seeds to this remote location.
There are other, more worrying, questions about the seed vaults. The project is owned and managed by the Norwegian government, in co-operation with the FAO and the Global Crop Diversity Trust -- which in turn is sponsored and funded by the United Nations and other grant funding bodies.
The security arrangements are the responsibility of the Governor of Svalbard, a Norwegian official. One wonders how much security a minor official on an island with a fluctuating population could provide. Due to the curious legal status of the semiautonomous islands, immigration rules are different to the rest of Norway and are entirely related to employment. If you don't have a job, you leave. Is anyone going to want to be there protecting seeds in the middle of Winter? Will Ocean's 15 be a seed heist?
According to the rules of the seed vault, it operates 'black box' arrangements, which means:
- that the deposit of the seeds will not affect any property or other rights pertaining to the material;
- that the deposited seeds will remain in sealed envelopes, unless otherwise agreed with the Depositor;
- That the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will take no action to further transfer the material except back to the original Depositor or the Depositor’s successor in title, or in accordance with the Depositor’s instructions. -- Svalbard Global Seed Vault
According to the NGO Grain, this approach is misguided.
What about the ownership of the seeds? The facility is in Norway and stores seed for governments and international bodies. Not the poor farmers, who are totally left out of the process. OK, Norway is relatively stable and the FAO is not likely to sell off the seed genes. But who is to say what will happen in the future? Surely a scheme based in a developed country, with little input from developing countries -- never mind the farmers themselves -- is inherently unfair.While it's true that crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected, as irreplaceable diversity is being lost at an alarming scale, relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in genebanks of developing countries. So the issue is not about being for or against genebanks, it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has a lot of inherent problems. -- Grain
As we have discussed on Celsias before, the ownership of the genes of food plants is a serious issue. Geoff Tansey discovered in a visit to Ethiopia the true protectors of agricultural biodiversity:
The then head and founder of the national gene bank, Dr Mekaku Worede, recognized that farmers knew more about the range and characteristics of varieties than he did. Farmers also had bred varieties well adapted to local environments using multiple selection criteria. These could stand the stresses from climate fluctuations and pest better than the more uniform modern varieties that were replacing them and which, with their increasingly expensive inputs, led farmers into debt and did not perform as well when conditions were poor." -- The Future Control of Food, edited by G Tansey and T Rajotte pg 195As GRAIN says, the best way to protect the biodiversity of food is not to place seeds in deep freeze in the High Arctic, but to "Stop destroying diversity instead!".
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