In a world increasingly plagued by natural calamities and man-made disasters, efforts for a food-secure future are of paramount importance. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle, the world’s ultimate failsafe facility for crop diversity, has a crucial role to play in this regard.
The facility was in news last month when precious seeds, originally sent by the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) for safeguarding, were safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon, having undertaken a 10,000km roundtrip. These seeds could hold the key to developing new crop varieties crucial to meeting world food demands with climate change.
The seeds 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.
The first of several retrievals to happen in the years ahead, the shipment contained 128 boxes with a total of 38,073 seed samples, which will be planted during this and next year’s cropping seasons. A total of 57 boxes containing forages, faba beans, lathyrus and the wild relatives of cereals and pulses were sent to Lebanon and 71 boxes containing accessions of cultivated wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea were sent to Morocco. A total of 350 boxes were originally sent to Svalbard.
Each sample will be planted and grown at ICARDA’s facilities to provide duplicate seeds, which will be used to re-establish the ICARDA active collection, and also be returned to the Seed Vault for safekeeping.
The seeds were originally stored at ICARDA’s genebank in Aleppo, Syria, where the ongoing conflict has made it increasingly difficult for ICARDA’s staff to ensure that material can be regenerated and distributed to users around the world.  This is the very first time that seeds previously deposited for safekeeping in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault have been retrieved, less than 10 years after the Vault opened. Buried deep in the permafrost on a remote Arctic archipelago, the Seed Vault currently holds more than 860,000 samples of seeds from almost every country in the world.
The shipments from Svalbard to Morocco and Lebanon have been entirely funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust), which is also a partner in the operation of the Seed Vault with the Government of Norway and NordGen. The Crop Trust’s mission is to conserve the planet’s crop diversity for the food security of current and future generations.  A recent study co-authored by the Crop Trust found that the planet’s food supply has grown increasingly dependent on only a few crop types over the past 50 years. Climate change will affect the ability of these crops to thrive and pressure will increase on the food system as the global population continues to increase.