| Summary: | The Svalbard Global Seed Vault officially opened on the 26th February 2008. The Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, and Nobel Peace Price-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai placed the first seeds in the vault during the widely media broadcasted opening ceremony. The strong symbolism in the project and its coincidence with a general increased focus on environmental and agricultural issues on the international policy agenda has already made the Seed Vault a global icon for biodiversity conservation. The vision behind the Seed Vault is to safeguard the world s crop diversity for the future by providing free of charge back-up storage for seed accessions held in conventional genbanks around the world. When reading some of the media reports about the project one can get the impression that the Seed Vault s purpose is to preserve all crop diversity in the world, forever, and all by itself. To anyone briefly familiar with the complex task of conserving plant genetic resources this is an obvious exaggeration of what the Seed Vault can offer. In this article I will give a brief outline of the Seed Vault s political and practical context and role. A vault, not a bank The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is not a gene bank. Gene banks do more than storing seeds; amongst other activities they viability test and regenerated their seed accessions when that is needed and normally they distribute seed samples to researchers, breeders and other users. The Seed Vault does not carry out such banking functions; it merely offers a safe backup site for the unique and important crop diversity held in the world s gene banks. According to FAO s database on institutions holding plant genetic resources for food and agriculture there are about 1400 of them around the world. Many of them are located in geopolitically unsafe areas, others in areas prone to natural disasters, many struggle to secure funding and maintain good management. Those are some reasons why a backup site is needed. Besides, it is only common sense to store ...
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