[Lapg] Banking against Doomsday/Gene banks represent an overdue push to preserve crop biodiversity/It also needs conserving on farms /Economist Magazine Mar10 2012

Mon Mar 12 07:34:32 PDT 2012

Agricultural biodiversity
Banking against Doomsday
Gene banks represent an overdue push to preserve crop biodiversity. It 
also needs conserving on farms
Mar 10th 2012 | LONGYEARBYEN | from the print edition
http://www.economist.com/node/21549931

WITH a heavy clunk, the steel outer doors of the Svalbard Global Seed 
Vault closed on February 28th, shutting out a howling Arctic gale and 
entombing a tonne of new arrivals: 25,000 seed samples from America, 
Colombia, Costa Rica, Tajikistan, Armenia and Syria. For Cary Fowler, 
the vault's American architect, the Syrian chickpeas and fava beans were 
especially welcome.

Opened in 2008, the Svalbard vault is a backup for the world's 1,750 
seed banks, storehouses of agricultural biodiversity. To illustrate the 
need for it, the Philippines' national seed bank was destroyed by fire 
in January, six years after it was damaged by flooding. Those of 
Afghanistan and Iraq were destroyed in recent wars. Should the conflict 
in Syria reach that country's richest store, in Aleppo, the damage would 
now be less. Some 110,000 Syrian seed samples are now in the Svalbard 
vault, out of around 750,000 samples in all. "When I see this," says Mr 
Fowler, looking lovingly at his latest consignment, "I just think, 
'thank goodness, they're safe.'"

The Svalbard vault is protected by two airlocks, at the end of a tunnel 
sunk 160 metres into the permafrost of Norway's Arctic archipelago, 
outside the village of Longyearbyen, one of the world's most northerly 
habitations. It is maintained at a constant temperature of -18°C. This 
is serious disaster preparedness: if its electricity were cut, Mr Fowler 
reckons the vault would take two centuries to warm to freezing point. He 
also enthusiastically points to its concave tunnel-head, designed to 
deflect the force of a missile strike. Such precautions have spawned the 
facility's nickname: the Doomsday Vault.

Mr Fowler, who manages it on behalf of Norway's government, an 
association of Nordic gene banks and an international body, the Global 
Crop Diversity Trust, reckons the vault contains samples of around 
two-thirds of the world's stored crop biodiversity. To augment this, he 
will also soon embark on a project, funded with $50m from Norway, to 
collect the seeds of many crops' wild ancestors.

A seedy business

Most seed banks were created in the 1970s and 1980s, towards the end of 
a global surge in crop yields, wrought largely through the adoption of 
hybridised seed varieties, known as the Green Revolution. The idea was 
born of a realisation that a vast amount of agricultural biodiversity 
was being lost, as farmers abandoned old seeds, often locally developed 
over centuries, for the new hybrids.

The extent of the loss, which continues today, is poorly documented. The 
extinction of non-human species is generally better studied than the 
loss of the genetic material that sustains humanity. Yet, largely on the 
basis of named crop varieties that are no longer extant, the UN's Food 
and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 75% of crop biodiversity has 
been lost from the world's fields. India is reckoned to have had over 
100,000 varieties of rice a century ago; it now has only a few thousand. 
America once had around 5,000 apple varieties, and now has a few 
hundred. Such measures probably underestimate the scale of the losses, 
because a single traditional seed variety often contains a lot of 
genetic diversity.

It is hard to quantify how much this matters; but the long-term risks 
are potentially huge. Agricultural biodiversity is the best hedge 
against future blights, including pests, diseases and climate change. 
That is why plant breeders, from poor smallholders to the world's 
biggest biotech firms, masters of the genetically modified organism 
(GMO), continuously update their genetic stock, often from obscure sources.

"If we ignore genetic diversity while we develop GMO products, we risk a 
disease or pest emerging that will wipe those types out," says John 
Soper, head of crop genetics research at Pioneer Hi-Bred, the seed 
division of DuPont, a chemicals giant. He says the firm has drawn 
genetic material from its stock of wild American sunflower seeds three 
or four times in the past decade, in a bid to make its commercial 
varieties resistant to broomrape, a parasitic blight of southern Europe. 
It also has plans to cope with climate change, having recently opened a 
research outfit in chilly western Canada. It is trying to develop local 
varieties of maize (corn) and soyabean, which are not grown there 
commercially, but may be as the temperature climbs.

*Yet biotech firms cannot be relied upon to look after crop 
biodiversity. Their gene banks are too small and too concentrated on a 
handful of commercial crops. Their urge to make profits is not 
necessarily aligned with the wider cause of feeding mankind. Hence a 
recent push to boost national gene banks, of which the Svalbard vault is 
a product.*

It is a heartening display of international co-operation. In the vault's 
frozen sanctum, North Korean seeds, in neat brown wooden boxes, sit 
alongside stocks from South Korea---and from Congo, Bangladesh and Peru. 
In many such developing countries, gene banks are impoverished and badly 
managed, which is another threat to their stocks. Pondering one of the 
risks, Mr Fowler warns "a millennium of agricultural activity can 
disappear one night in a bowl of porridge."

*Yet seed banks are not the only answer to saving crop biodiversity: it 
also needs conserving in fields. This is because seed banks rarely store 
varieties of crop that do not produce seeds, including cassava, bananas 
and many other fruits and berries. They also rarely record local 
knowledge of their deposits, which can be almost as important as the 
seeds themselves. Unlike seed banks, moreover, nature is anything but 
ossified: it is gloriously adaptable. Over the past 15 years in West 
Africa, for example, populations of traditional sorghum varieties have 
been observed shortening their growth cycle by two weeks in response to 
a curtailed rainy season. The best way to harness this adaptability is 
simply to let nature get on with it*.

Farmers' eagerness to jettison their wily old landraces is 
understandable. Improved varieties of seed are estimated to have boosted 
yields by 21-43%, independently of fertilisers and other inputs. To 
conserve crop biodiversity amid the inevitable rush for hybrids, seed 
banks have an important role. But another solution---as to many 
climate-related problems---is to make drastic improvements in land-use 
planning, and then encourage strategically placed farmers to dedicate a 
small area to traditional crops. Ways of doing this include developing 
niche markets for their endearingly old-school vegetables and grains or 
even, as in Nepal, with the national equivalent of a harvest festival. 
Its government regularly dishes out prizes to those farmers with the 
most biodiverse land.
*
Such measures are less glamorous and more troublesome than depositing 
seeds in an Arctic bunker kindly paid for by Norwegian taxpayers. That 
is why they are too rarely taken, which is a great shame. If the world 
did a better job of tending crop biodiversity in its fields, the feared 
Doomsday after which the vault is nicknamed would be even less likely to 
come.*
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