3/13/2023 0 Comments Syria seeds from doomsday vault![]() ![]() The seeds were grown and re-deposited at the Svalbard vault in 2017. In 2015, researchers made a first withdrawal from the vault after Syria's civil war damaged a seed bank near the city of Aleppo. With Tuesday's deposit, it will contain one million different kinds of seeds, from almost all nations. "We need to preserve this biodiversity, this crop diversity, to provide healthy diets and nutritious foods, and for providing farmers, especially smallholders, with sustainable livelihoods so that they can adapt to new conditions."Īlready, one in nine people go to bed hungry globally, according to the United Nations' World Food Programme, and scientists have predicted that erratic weather patterns could reduce both the quality and the quantity of food available. "The seed vault is the backup in the global system of conservation to secure food security on Earth," Stefan Schmitz, executive director of the Crop Trust, the Bonn-based organisation which manages the vault, told Reuters. 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 - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail. The vault also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new varieties of crops. The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in Britain will bank seeds harvested from the meadows of Prince Charles' private residence, Highgrove, including from grass species, clovers and broad-leaved flowering herbs. ![]() On Tuesday 30 gene banks will deposit seeds, including from India, Mali, Peru and the Cherokee Nation in the United States, which will bank samples of maize, bean and squash. Dubbed the "doomsday vault", the facility lies on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and is only opened a few times a year in order to preserve the seeds inside. ![]()
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