Located between the top of Norway and the North Pole on the Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard is a facility known as the World Seed Vault.
Built deep into a mountain, over 1.3 million varieties of seed are stored here at -18°C.
Since construction began on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2006 and its launch in 2008, there has been an air of mystique surrounding its purpose.
It has often been portrayed as a ‘doomsday’ vault, serving as a store for the world’s key food crops in the event of an extinction of the key plant species necessary for human survival.
At the World Seed Congress (WSC), which recently took place in Istanbul, Turkey, Agriland asked the key architect of the World Seed Vault, Dr. Cary Fowler how what he describes as a “the safety, back-up store for global agriculture” came into being.
Dr. Fowler said: “I am pleased by the development at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. We now have samples of 1,345,000 different crop varieties. That’s more than most people think exist in the world.
“These are housed as a safety backup for global agriculture – we’ve miraculously not lost any seeds in the transit process going up to Svalbard and we’ve been able to restore at least one major collection along the way that was in the process of being lost.
“So this is the biological foundation of agriculture and something I think that needs to be conserved if we plan on having agriculture around much longer.”
While Dr Cary acknowledged the advantages of being able to conserve global agriculture, he noted another positive development of the vault.
“I think the point would be that we can come together as countries to do essential long-term things if we try and if we do that, it inspires other people, I think,” he said.
Sowing the seeds for the vault
In delivering the keynote address at the WSC, Dr. Fowler – who was the winner of the 2024 World Food Prize – said: “When I was head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, at a certain point it just struck me: ‘This is not good enough because the safety of our most-valuable natural resource on earth was only as safe as a building was safe and they’re subject to all kinds of issues’.
“So I thought ‘OK, let’s have a safety back-up, a failsafe place, an insurance policy, to keep this’ and we went far north to try to do that.”
Svalbard is about as far north as commercial flights go, and “has the advantage of being remote but also very cold so it can save seed for a long time”.
“We envisaged it would be a seed vault that would be built in the middle of the mountain where it’s very cold,” Fowler explained.
While the region is naturally cold, the seed samples are stored in freezers at -18°C.
“If the refrigeration fails, the temperature might slowly rise to -4 or -5°C but would still remain frozen and that would give us many months to get the repair man out to fix the refrigeration,” Dr Fowler said.
“Each sample contains 400-500 seeds and there are more than 1.3 million different seed populations or what normal people would call ‘varieties’.
“This includes more than 150,000 samples of rice, more than 150,000 samples of wheat. This is the largest collection of biodiversity anywhere in the world.”
The American agriculturalist believes that the answers to many challenges facing global crop production “are in the seed banks”.
A doomsday vault?
Dr. Fowler was asked if the seed vault is a ‘doomsday vault’, as it has been portrayed in the media.
He said: “We did not think anyone in the world would be interested in what we were doing. Frankly, crop diversity, gene banks – it was never in the media – they would say it’s a boring subject.
“I have to acknowledge if something gigantic potentially happened, it would be in that case ‘a doomsday vault’, but we never thought of it that way. What we wanted to do was protect the more mundane extinction that takes place.
“We wanted to end that kind of drip, drip, drip extinction,” he clarified.
He explained that the seed vault “operates like a safety deposit box at the bank”.
“Depositors send a copy of their seeds and the seed vault protects those seeds free of charge, and if anything happens to the original copy, the sample in the seed bank can be returned to the depositor. Nobody else has access to them.”
In his presentation at the WSC, he noted that some of his “”favourite boxes” in the seed vault came from a seed bank located outside Aleppo in Syria.
He said: “The reason they’re my favourite is because we got those boxes out in an emergency situation just before all hell broke loose in Aleppo during the civil war there.
“So those boxes came out overland on a truck for two weeks before they could fly to the centre here.”
He explained that the seed samples contained in these boxes came from the Consortium of International Agricultural Research centre (CGIAR) in Aleppo which was “a major holder of materials – particularly wheat, barley and several other important crops” of which were drought tolerant and that the samples are “of global importance”.
“It would have been a true global humanitarian disaster had that collection been lost,” the agriculturalist said.
Why not just keep the best seed?
Dr. Fowler said he is often asked why not only keep ‘the best seed varieties’ in the vault.
He explained: “The problem is, we don’t know which ones are the best and the best changes all the time so a variety or trait that might be useful or considered ‘the best’ today might be an insects’ lunch tomorrow. Things change in the world.
“There’s a great American conservationist named Aldo Leopold and he said: ‘The first rule of successful tinkering is to save all the pieces’, and I think we’re still tinkering, we’re still playing with agriculture in a way.”
He emphasised the importance of saving ‘all the pieces’ in the form of seed varieties “particularly when it’s so easy and cheap to do so and so expensive to lose them”.
Dr. Fowler pointed to examples in history where seed samples of poor-yielding varieties of crops such as wheat were preserved in countres that later became important in breeding programmes in other regions in the world.
“One of my heroes, Jack Harlan, had collected what he described as ‘a hopelessly useless variety of wheat’ in this county [Turkey] back in 1948.”
Dr. Fowler explained that, in 1963, plant breeders were examining how to make US wheat resistant to stripe rust and discovered that this supposedly ‘useless’ Turkish wheat variety was immune to four kinds of stripe rust and forty-seven other wheat diseases.
The Turkish wheat was then crossbred with US varieties of wheat.
Dr. Fowler asked: “What did it cost to conserve that wheat? Virtually nothing. But had we not done that, if we had forfeited that benefit – and that’s the story of crop diversity.”
