Deep within a mountain in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Circle, is a 12 x 27 metre room buried 120 metres below the rock and permafrost, kept at 18°C below zero. The room holds the blueprints to 12,000 years of agriculture and is, scientists say, the ultimate insurance policy against millions of crop varieties—and the ability of mankind to feed itself—being lost to war, climate change and human error.
As the Svalbard Global Seed Vault marks its tenth birthday amid alarm over unseasonably high temperatures in the Arctic, the initiative has never seemed more important. It was founded in 2008 by the Crop Trust, in collaboration with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (Nordgen), with an initial investment of US$9m. The vault stores perhaps as many as half of all the agricultural seeds currently in existence.
In February 2018 the latest delivery of valuable seed samples—including rice, wheat, maize, black-eyed peas, Estonian onion potato, Irish barley and Bambara groundnuts, a drought-tolerant crop that is being promoted in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—saw the Arctic seed bank’s reserves reach the 1m mark. Seeds for an estimated 2.2m crops, it is hoped, will eventually be deposited there.
The seeds are back-ups for samples housed in a further 1,700 gene banks—most of them far smaller and with far fewer resources, dotted around the world—in turn the product of a 2001 treaty that has seen 144 countries so far undertake to protect the vital genetic information contained within everyday crops against a growing host of risks.
Producing more with less
Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, told Reuters in February that “agriculture has never, ever faced bigger challenges than today,” citing population growth and climate change as particular strains on the food supply. The global agricultural system has to produce more food with greater nutritional value using less land and less water, while reducing its dependence on damaging artificial pesticides and fertilisers.
Some 60% of global calorie intake comes from wheat, rice and maize alone, with 12 plants and five animal species providing 75% of the food that the world eats. This lack of genetic biodiversity among the food supply creates huge risks, not least of disease wiping out swathes of an entire crop. The seeds stored either locally or in Svalbard can then, it is hoped, restore crops to their original state and make them resistant to new strains of disease.
The Arctic seed bank has already paid out to repair the damage from another man-made disaster. After a seed bank near the city of Aleppo was damaged by fighting, a Morocco-based agricultural institute, ACARDA, withdrew seeds from Svalbard and replicated the lost Syrian cache in new centres in Morocco and Lebanon, eventually returning over 8,600 seed samples of wheat, barley, durum wheat, chickpeas and fava beans, including their wild relatives, to the Arctic seed bank in February this year.
Protecting biodiversity and the food supply
But the Svalbard Global Seed Vault faces some difficulties of its own. Some countries, such as China, are yet to donate samples from their agricultural systems, although it is hoped that they will follow suit as global risks to farming become more acute. A more pressing, if manageable, challenge comes from a warming Arctic, where the ocean is set to be ice-free during the summer months within two or three decades. In late 2016 a thaw of nearby permafrost saw meltwater flow into the entrance tunnel of the vault, although it didn’t reach the frozen seed chambers themselves.
Norway is to spend US$13m on upgrading the facility, including the addition of a new concrete access tunnel and a service building to provide emergency power and refrigeration units. This should protect the seeds stored inside from a warmer and wetter future. But the existence of the Arctic seed bank—sometimes referred to as a “Domesday vault”—as a last resort highlights the need for effective action to be taken on a national and local level to protect the food supply.
Diversification of the agricultural system, for example, is one of the indicators captured by the Food Sustainability Index (FSI), developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition. Of the 34 countries analysed, ranked and mapped by the FSI, those that scored the highest on this indicator—reflecting the percentage of agricultural production made up by their top three crops—were Spain (30%), Israel (31.5%), Greece, (32.1%) and China (33.9%). Among the lowest-scored, with a high reliance on a small number of crops, were Brazil (88.2%), Australia (75.9%), Argentina (74.7%) and the US (72.9%), with serious implications for their agricultural systems’ resistance to disease.
Other indicators captured by the FSI include agricultural techniques for climate-change mitigation; the age and gender composition of land users; agriculture sciences R&D expenditure; deforestation; land ownership; organic agriculture; and water usage. These all point to areas where countries can work to ensure the resistance of their food systems to climate change, conflict, disease and socio-economic pressures. By improving food sustainability in a holistic way, encompassing food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, and nutritional challenges (the three pillars of the FSI), the world can ensure that the global seed vault is needed only in extraordinary circumstances.