So it is even more important that we take care of whatever diversity we are left with.īut I also vividly remember heartwarming moments from my Svalbard trip. As much as 22% of the wild relatives of important food crops of peanut, potato and beans will disappear by 2055 because of a changing climate, it warned more than a decade ago. We have already lost 75% of crop diversity between 19, according to FAO, the UN food and agri agency. With the latest news of Ukraine’s gene bank, I am reminded once again that both climate pressures and conflicts are threatening our ability to produce food, and we need to do everything we can to preserve our crop biodiversity. One is about wild rice growing in northern Australia’s crocodile-infested waters that could hold the key to breeding a more nutritious grain that is drought and pest resistant and the other is about wild varieties of chickpeas found only in southeastern Turkey near the border with Syria that could prevent our beloved legume from going extinct. Here are two articles I’ve written in the past about these cousins. In those cases, we don’t have a choice but to conserve crop biodiversity in the deep freeze.īut when we can, we should encourage the conservation and care of crop wild relatives - cousins of the food crops we now eat but are still growing in nature - because they can form part of the answer to creating more resilient crops. We humans have been relentless in our destruction of ecosystems, either as a result of war or pure greed. There are debates over which approach is better but I believe we need both to preserve threatened species. This essentially means conservation ‘in place’ ( in situ ) and ‘out of place’ ( ex situ ).Īn in situ approach is like keeping crops in their natural habitat like a farmer’ fields or in the wild, allowing them to adapt to changing conditions of the soil, temperature, humidity, etc.Īn ex situ approach is collecting and storing these crops, mostly in the forms of seeds, in gene banks like the ones in Svalbard and Ukraine. There are more than 1,700 seed banks - also called gene banks - around the world and these can range from small national collections in a nondescript building to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the epitome of cool ( literally ) built 120 metres into the rock face on a remote island above the Arctic Circle, where polar bears roam. Which is why seed banks are crucial - they provide us with crucial back-ups for when storms, bombs, pests and other threats wipe out entire crops and research material for scientists to come up with crops that are resilient to increasingly hostile weather patterns. The world used to cultivate around 7,000 different plants but experts say we now get about 60% of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice. The objective is to both archive and preserve crop biodiversity. In more developed countries, they are stored in vaults that are underground and/or protected from natural disasters, military attacks and nuclear war. These are physical buildings that house seeds, but usually in dehydrated or frozen form inside freezers or vaults that are set to sub-zero temperatures. These updates are very welcome but it doesn’t mean the site or the genetic resources so crucial for growing our food are now safe. This Newsweek Fact Check piece is a handy guide. Later articles, by The Economist (May 25) and Reuters (Jun 1) further clarified that it was only a research facility that was damaged, not the whole seed bank. I haven’t been able to find the video as it is set to private. On May 19, Kyiv Post provided a touch more detail, and said it was “nearly destroyed” by Russian shelling. The Odessa Journal wrote a short news item on May 16 that invaders destroyed it, citing an announcement by the institute’s lead researcher Sergey Avramenko on his private YouTube channel. It is the country’s second-largest city and one of the worst-affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Īt the beginning of 2021, the seed bank, the tenth largest in the world, had more than 150,000 specimens belonging to 544 crops and 1,802 species of plants but only 4% were backed up in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault ( pictured ). The National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukrain was founded in 1908 and based in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.
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