Seed doomsday vault syria full#

So far, it appears that the cold, the travel, and time haven't damaged the seeds, officials said. Gene banks and organizations around the world have deposited about 860,000 samples of seeds at the Global Seed Vault in Norway's Svalbard archipelago to back up their own collections in case of man-made or natural calamities. In the first withdrawal from a 'doomsday' seed vault in the Arctic, thousands of seeds that were originally kept in war-stricken Syria have been safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon, officials said Monday. 18, 2015, Director of Finance of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Michael Koch inspects the remaining seeds belonging to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, at the Global Seed Vault, in Svalbard, Norway. 'We can get, through crossing and breeding, traits that are tolerant to drought, tolerant to heat, tolerant to specific diseases and so forth,' said ICARDA Director-General Mahmoud El-Solh. They will be used by ICARDA to fulfil requests for crop diversity from breeders, researchers and farmers around the world, so they can develop and test new strains to cope with a changing climate and new diseases. Nearly two-thirds of the specimens withdrawn last month are unique varieties of ancient crops from across the Middle East and Africa. 'Visitors see it as a James Bond kind of place, as extraordinary,' Koch said. 18, 2015, rows of boxes containing seed samples stored inside the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. Perched on the side of a mountain, a door leads the rare visitor down a 120-meter-long (400-foot-long) tunnel into the mountain. Located on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, the main city in Svalbard, the gray concrete entrance to the vault blends into the wilderness. 'We wanted to make sure that the publicity around this deposit is not taken by someone for different purposes,' Koch told an Associated Press journalist visiting the Svalbard Seed Vault, just 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the North Pole. The shipments were conducted secretly to avoid any security problems. 'It just shows that the global system of fail-safe backup works,' said Michael Koch, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funded the shipments.

Seed doomsday vault syria full#

The center is located in Aleppo but is no longer able to make full use of its facilities due to the war in Syria. In secret shipments last month, about 38,000 seed samples including wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea were sent from Norway to research stations in Morocco and Lebanon operated by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA. Since the facility, sometimes known as a 'doomsday vault,' opened eight years ago, this is the first time that seeds have been withdrawn. It will take some years to assemble because some genebanks need to multiply stocks of seed first, and other seeds need regenerating before they can be shipped to Svalbard.Gene banks and organizations around the world have deposited about 860,000 samples of seeds at the Global Seed Vault in Norway's Svalbard archipelago to back up their own collections in case of man-made or natural calamities. The objective of the Seed Vault is to safeguard as much of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible, while also avoiding unnecessary duplication.

In fact, the Seed Vault already holds the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world.

These range from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato. Each packet of seeds consists of an average of 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds may be stored in the Seed Vault.Ĭurrently, the Seed Vault holds more than 1.1 million seed varieties, originating from almost every country in the world. The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops.