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Seed Vault Services Big Agriculture
18 May 2008
The Norwegian Government has built the first global seed vault underground in their high Arctic region near Svalbard. Let’s say we were underwhelmed. Its inauguration late February was widely reported and captured the public's imagination receiving praise from the scientific community around the world. We here at Seed Savers received alerts every day from friends and strangers. However we were far from overjoyed. What a waste of money and effort.
Food cropping systems and original seeds cannot be dissociated from the bio-cultural life of gardeners and farmers and from the growing environment. Seeds that are grown out every year respond to cultural preferences and to climate change. They are ever changing. In contrast the only characteristic that a sample of seeds kept in a frozen coma in the Arctic may express is capacity to being stored in extreme cold.
Scale and Quality Models
It comes down to scale and quality. What scale of food production do you support, considering environmental and social concerns? What quality of food do you want? These choices depend on the type of seed storing system that is at the base of food production. A large and expensive seed bank services large-scale production of food that is hauled long distances. Local seed exchange systems service small, local, diverse food production. We need to be clear about which produces better food.
The first model involves the centralisation of major world crops (maize, wheat, rice, canola, cotton, etc) in frozen seed banks for the use of seed companies that service the production of industrialised food shipped from one end of the planet to the other. The environmental ramifications of industrial agriculture have been well documented.
The second is a decentralised system with millions of gardeners and farmers conserving a huge diversity of species and varieties in the ever-changing climate, exchanging them in a dynamic system and producing quality food on a small, local scale.
You, as a subscriber to Seed Savers, have chosen to support the latter. Thank you.
Source of Seeds and Access
Seed samples from large seed banks will constitute the collection at the even larger Svalbard seed vault. For the last few decades seed samples of the major commercial crops have been collected from farmers around the world and stored in two types of large seed banks: national seed banks and thirteen large frozen seed banks administered by the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR). The CGIAR is pro-agrobusiness and pro-GM. Their sponsors include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Monsanto, the Syngenta Foundation set up by the Swiss-based GM seed and agrochemical company of the same name and Pioneer Hi-bred that has amalgamated with Dupont.
The small farmers who save their seeds are continuing effective cultural and seed guardians and deserve support to be allowed to continue their quiet breeding and conservation work that started 10 000 years ago. The "all the eggs in one basket seed vault " guarded by gunmen, as reported in the press, is, at best, complementary to this time-honoured method of seed saving. The people doing the real conservation work are the subsistence farmers who grow and store seeds in their home-built granaries, in their cupboards, in underground storage. And they have been the originators of this massive collection!
Troubles in the Seed Bank
We can only agree with these comments on the Svalbard seed vault from two sisters seed NGOs:
GRAIN in Barcelona:
"This ‘ultimate safety net’ for crop biodiversity is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant - indeed, only - approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international gene bank system.
The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these problems. Because it is a ‘doomsday’ backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway's history, even though the facility's feasibility study assured that ‘there is no volcanic or significant seismic activity’ in the area.
But more troubling than any technical matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands. CGIAR has even set up a legal arrangement of ‘trusteeship’ that it exercises over the treasure chest of farmers' seeds that it holds ‘on behalf of’ the international community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers from whom they took the seeds in the first place if this was okay and they left farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.”
www.grain.org
ETC group in Canada
Geneticists know that many problems with large scale seed, or gene, banks arise from a lack of money, a lack of training, failures in political commitment of national governments, and a series of technical mis-judgments related to storage conditions, containers, humidity, germination testing, and seed multiplication.
Originators Distrust the Collector
The South’s farmers are also unhappy. Almost all of the world’s crops were domesticated in the tropics and subtropics of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Most of the remaining crop genetic diversity lies in farmers’ fields in these regions. Most of the genetic diversity in gene banks " including the biggest banks in the United States, Europe and Japan " comes from those farmers. Initiatives that would store more seed still further away are not likely to draw praise.
Quite rightly, farmers also distrust the way scientists have collected genetic diversity in their fields. Farmers’ varieties are not like commercial seed varieties that have been bred for maximum genetic uniformity, primarily to meet the requirements of patent offices and, secondarily, to allow for machine harvesting. Farmers’ varieties are more like “populations” less like identical twins than like kissing cousins that welcome genetic variation in the family. The greater the diversity in the field the more likely seed is to withstand pests and diseases and for the family to have something to eat at harvest time.
The whole idea of gene banks is biased toward the conservation of genetically-uniform commercial varieties least in need of protection and least of value in the future. Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some hypothetic emergency. The real urgency, however, is to let diversity live - in farms, in the hand of farmers, and across people-controlled and community-oriented markets - today.
www.etcgroup.org
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