Tag Archives: seed banks and war

Food Security: The Silicon Valley of Seeds

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The Communist Party’s top disciplinary body—after punishing graft in the military, domestic security organs and the financial sector—is now hunting officials, merchants and farmers it suspects of harvesting illicit profits from trade in grains and seeds. Tasked with being more forceful in safeguarding the nation’s “seed security,” authorities have investigated dozens of cases involving seed-related misconduct and, in several instances, imprisoned grain-sector officials on corruption charges…Officials say the goal is to stop the proliferation of fake and substandard seeds that could jeopardize food production and safety, while punishing officials, merchants and farmers who siphon agricultural subsidies and peddle low-grade seeds.

Xi has often highlighted food security as a national interest, calling on officials to ensure that China can fully nourish its 1.4 billion people. His demands have taken on greater urgency in recent years as he pushed to prepare his country for a potential confrontation with the U.S.—a major source of Chinese grain imports, including soybeans and corn—and forestall disruptions to food supplies for one of the world’s most populous nations…Today, Beijing sees the seed sector as one of several strategic industries where Western powers could flex their technological superiority to strangle a lagging China. Demonstrating his personal interest in this field, Xi has twice visited a seed-breeding base in the island province of Hainan that officials call the “Silicon Valley” of China’s seed industry.

China is the world’s largest grain producer, growing one-quarter of global supply on less than 10% of the world’s arable land. But its ability to feed its own people has slipped over recent decades by some estimates. ..Officials and state media have taken to comparing seeds to advanced semiconductor chips, a technology that China has pledged to master in its quest for a national renaissance…While China’s seed industry is strong enough to survive foreign strangulation, the country still falls behind in seed quality, according to the Farmers’ Daily, which recommended measures including “resolutely cracking down” on the trading of fake and mislabeled seeds, whereby officials and merchants defraud farmers with counterfeit or lower-grade goods marked as top-quality seeds….

Excerpts from China’s Corruption Hunters Target Produce Aisle in Push for Seed Security, WSJ, July 25, 2023

Preserving Seeds that Feed the World: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

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Six hundred miles from the North Pole, on an island the size of West Virginia, at the end of a tunnel bored into a mountain, lies a vault filled with more than 1 million samples of seeds harvested from 6,374 species of plants grown in 249 locations around the globe.The collection, the largest of its kind, is intended to safeguard the genetic diversity of the crops that feed the world.  If disaster wipes out a plant, seeds from the vault could be used to restore the species. If pests, disease or climate change imperil a food source, a resistant trait found among the collection could thwart the threat.

While some countries have their own seed banks—Colorado State University houses one for the U.S.—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault serves as a backup. The vault, built in 2008 at a cost of about $9 million, is owned and maintained by Norway, but its contents belong to the countries and places that provide the samples.  “It works like a safe-deposit box at the bank,” said Cary Fowler, an American agriculturalist who helped found the vault. “Norway owns the facility, but not the boxes of the seeds.”

In 2015, after the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas was destroyed in the Syrian civil war, scientists who had fled the country withdrew seeds to regenerate the plants in Lebanon and Morocco.  “It had one of the world’s biggest and best collections of wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, faba beans and grass pea,” Dr. Fowler said. “It was the chief supplier of a disease-resistant wheat variety for the Middle East.”  In 2017, the group returned copies of its seeds to the vault.

The 18,540-square-foot seed vault includes three rooms with the capacity to house 4.5 million samples of 500 seeds each—a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds. The environment’s natural temperature remains below freezing year round, but the seeds are stored at a chillier -18 degrees Celsius, or around -0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. They’re expected to last for decades, centuries or perhaps even millennia….

While dwindling diversity might not seem like an imminent threat, four chemical companies now control more than 60% of global proprietary seed sales…That concentration of power, some worry, could lead to less agricultural variety and more genetic uniformity…In the meantime, the seed vault (which doesn’t store genetically modified seeds) will continue to accept deposits in an effort to preserve all of the options it can.

Excerpts from Craven McGinty, Plan to Save World’s Crops Lives in Norwegian Bunker, WSJ,  May 29, 2020

Gene Banks: saving world’s crops

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Syria’s civil war has forced scientists to request the first-ever withdrawal of seeds from a Doomsday vault built in the Arctic to safeguard the world’s food supplies…The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) said it has made a request to take back some of its samples from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault was created by the Norwegian government in 2008 to protect vital crops such as wheat against global disasters, war or disease.

It will be the first time seeds have been withdrawn from the facility, which lies more than 800 miles inside Arctic Circle — midway between Norway and the North Pole — and is the largest vault of its kind in the world. Built into the mountainside on the Svalbard archipelago, it relies on permafrost and thick rock to ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen even without power..,ICARDA has requested approximately 16,500 of its seed samples — one seventh of the total it has stored in Svalbard — and hopes to reproduce them at its other facilities in Morocco and the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. Eventually it will send new samples back to Norway…

He said some scientists were still present at the Aleppo facility but that its one-time headquarters had been occupied by armed groups.  “Fortunately it is not ISIS, they are some fundamentalist groups,” he said. “They seem to co-exist. They are using the land for their own benefit, for example to grow legumes, but we have no control of it…..The Svalbard seed bank has exactly 865,871 samples from every country in the world, Asdal said.  “In fact, we have seeds from more countries than now exist,” he explained, since some of the older seeds are from now-defunct nations such as Czechoslovakia. Syria’s civil war has killed a quarter of a million people since 2011, according to United Nations estimates, and driven 11 million more from their homes.

Excerpts from ALASTAIR JAMIESON, Syria War Forces First Withdrawal from Svalbard Global Seed Vault,NBC News, Sept. 25, 2015