The seed bank and acquisition of the seeds is managed by an entity known as the Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, now based in Bonn, Germany. What is notable is the list of those backing this highly unusual public-private partnership. Who would decide how to distribute those seeds in event of such a catastrophe is not addressed. The Svalbard vault has been called the “Noah’s ark of seeds,” there should a “global catastrophe” occur, to allow a theoretical restart to world agriculture. The publicly-stated argument for the major seed bank project is supposedly as a safe backup for the numerous national seed bank collections in event they are destroyed in war as in Syria or Iraq, or by natural disaster or other calamity. Notably, as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg pointed out during the recent seed-greeting ceremony, the year 2020 is slated as the year by which countries should have safeguarded genetic diversity of crops to meet the UN goal of “eliminating hunger by 2030.” The year 2030 is when the UN IPCC predicts catastrophic climate change barring a radical action from the world, as well as the key benchmark year for the UN’s Malthusian Agenda 2030. The only problem was planners did not make the structure, built into a mountain side, waterproof and the entrance flooded amid heavy rains in 2016, necessitating a major € 20 million of repairs and upgrade which were just completed, some four years later. The Norwegian government put up much of the money for the construction of the facility whose backers declared it was able to withstand a nuclear bomb blast. The Svalbard vault is on the island that is legally part of Norway since a 1925 treaty. The latest seed deposits include onions from Brazil, guar beans from central Asia, corn seeds sacred to the Cherokee nation and wildflowers from a meadow at Prince Charles’s home in the UK (sic). This brings the total of seed types to over one million since the vault was first opened for deposits in early 2008. On February 25 more than 60,000 new seed varieties were placed in the Svalbard vault, the largest deposit of seeds since it opened. What makes this entire seed bank enterprise suspicious at the very least is the list of financial sponsors behind the global project The Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault on Spitsbergen Island north of the Arctic Circle just received an additional major shipment of plant variety seeds for its special storage. Image Credit: Subiet - License: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license with conditions Īgainst the backdrop of the spreading fear about a global coronavirus pandemic, an event has slipped largely under the radar at a spot so removed from the rest of the world that most are unaware of its existence. What’s Going On With the Arctic ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault?
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