PHOTO: Piece of Cake/Shutterstock.com
We recommend having two sets of safety duplications – because a disaster can destroy a whole collection in the region.
Sarada Krishnan, Global Crop Diversity Trust, Director of Programs
PHOTO: Scharfsinn/Shutterstock.com
OPEC Fund Quarterly : The Crop Trust has been working with FAO to safeguard Ukraine’s national seed collection. How important are national collections in these uncertain times? And how important is crop diversity to food security worldwide? Sarada Krishnan: The Ukraine mission was important because the national gene bank in Kharkiv was in danger of being damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling. So, in early 2023, FAO led a successful operation to move the entire collection over 1,000 km to relative safety in the west of the country. But that’s not the end of the story: Over the next few months we’ll be working with the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture to develop a plan for the long-term preservation of the gene bank. The first step is to move the seeds to a safer location, often in a neighboring country. The second step is to back them up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. We recommend having two sets of safety duplications – because a war, cyclone or other disaster can destroy a whole collection in the region. Svalbard is not only the second level of safety duplication but simply the safest place on earth for seeds. We can draw an important lesson from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas
SK: It is indeed the ultimate insurance policy, built over 100 meters into a permafrost mountain in a geologically stable area, way above sea level. But its importance goes far beyond climate change. Take the gene bank I mentioned in Syria: If that had not been “backed up” in Svalbard, the world would have lost its entire collection forever. And we’re not just talking about everyday crops. Svalbard also stores “crop wild relatives”, which are often threatened by deforestation and loss of habitat. It’s a second safety duplicate that is never going to be touched unless all else fails. If a national gene bank loses its collections, it can go back to Svalbard, retrieve its seeds, regenerate them in the region or home country when safe to do so, and then eventually deposit them back again in Svalbard. OFQ : What exactly are crop wild relatives? SK: They are the wild cousins of our cultivated crops and could be a different species of the same genus or belonging to different genera, but closely related. We’ve lost a lot of genetic diversity through domestication over the past 10,000 years, but now our climate is changing and the traits that we needed, say, 1,000 years ago may no longer be fit for purpose. We need to study the traits of these wild relatives and incorporate them into cultivated varieties. But traditional breeding takes
(ICARDA), which was in Aleppo at the start of the war in Syria. The researchers quickly lost access to the gene bank, but because of the backup at Svalbard they were able to retrieve those collections and have since established two new gene banks in the region to continue their work: one in Morocco, the other in Lebanon. That is just one example of why safety duplication is so important. In broader terms, agriculture is an important part of any country’s livelihood because we all need food to live. There are global crops held at Svalbard like wheat, maize and rice, but national gene banks are very important for the conservation of local crops, which are also valuable from a cultural perspective. Almost every country has its own gene bank; some are cared for, but others need help. That’s where we come in – ensuring that genetic resources are protected in all their diversity. OFQ : Svalbard was named the 10th most influential project of the last half century “for building the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply”, according to the Project Management Institute. It’s now been running for 15 years and holds well over a million seed samples, with space for 3 million more. Why is Svalbard so important in the context of climate change?
28
Powered by FlippingBook