Day 25: Rescuing seeds to save mankind

 

Svalbarg Global Seed Bank, in Norway. Credit (both images): Mari Tefre, Global Crop Diversity Trust

The Obama administration has ushered in an “Era of Responsibility” and brows are furrowed all over the globe about climate change.

One man is taking the opportunity to suggest an area of responsibility — and a way to boost the chance for human survival no matter what comes down from the skies.

Seeds.

The cultivation of seeds helped forge the success of the human species, and Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, says some of the oldest varieties could hold the key to worldwide food security into the future. He’s urging people to remember the seeds that evolved with farmers over thousands of years, even as modern agriculture largely ignores them.

Fowler, a two-time cancer survivor with a renewed purpose, has endeavored to save as many of the world’s seeds as he can. His organization is behind the pioneering effort to build and operate the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway, and is enjoying good, early success at collecting at-risk and agriculturally important seeds to store there. Just two years after launching its effort to save endangered crop species, the Trust has announced that it’s on track to save from extinction 100,000 different varieties of food crops from 46 countries, making it one of the largest and most successful biological rescue efforts ever undertaken.

“We are moving quickly to regenerate and preserve seed samples representing thousands of distinct varieties of critical food crops like rice, maize, and wheat in 46 countries that were well on their way to total extinction,” Fowler said. “I think it is fair to say that without this effort, many of them would have been lost forever.”

In many countries, stresses as mundane as poor refrigeration and inadequate funding and as dramatic as war and economic collapse threaten seed collections of crop varieties that do not exist anywhere else in the world. The imperiled seeds targeted for rescue by the Trust are samples of staple crops stored in crop gene banks in Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Central and South America. They include rare varieties of barley, wheat, rice, banana/plantain, potato, cassava, chickpea, maize, lentil, bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea and yam.

Fowler said the Trust already has agreements in place with 49 institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000 crop samples identified as endangered. Agreements for preserving the remaining varieties are expected to be completed soon. The main funding for the project was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional support from the Grains Research and Development Corporation, an Australian farmers’ organization.

Fowler believes seeds in the collection could be critically important to the future of global food production, especially since some are adapted to pests and diseases, poor soils, and rapidly changing climate conditions.

“Growing conditions and food demands change rapidly and breeders never know which variety stored in a crop gene bank somewhere in the world is going to be that proverbial needle in the haystack that will provide the critical trait that can literally make the difference between abundance and starvation,” he said. “So while these seeds being saved represent crop varieties from the past, they could easily play a role in the crops of the future.”

One immediate benefit of the rescue initiative is that producing new seeds requires growing the plant. The process reveals information about its appearance and performance that could help breeders and others determine whether the sample may be of use to them in their work.

“We’re not preserving these samples to be museum pieces,” Fowler said. “Even when we are regenerating a variety ostensibly to produce new seeds, breeders are looking at that plant for certain qualities, such as heat resistance, drought tolerance, weed or pest resistance, that could improve food production right now.”

Much of this post comes from a press release at Eurekalert. The new seed vault at Svalbard was partly modeled on the National Seed Storage Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado. Jonathan Seabrook wrote an excellent article about seed banking in the August 2007 New Yorker: “Sowing for Apocalypse.”