Doomsday Seed Vault to Distribute Seeds for First Time…Because of Disruption

The doomsday seed vault – described by its creators as the “final backup” of the world’s crop collections – is making its first withdrawal less than 10 years after it opened because of the civil war in Syria. The Arctic vault’s ambitious worldwide goal, securing the worldwide food supply and supplanting numerous world’s regionally based seed vaults, has been criticized as overreaching and finding funding to keep the project operating has become a challenge. So it is conspicuous that, for the first time, the Norwegian-run facility will open the vault to remove some of its contents. “When disaster strikes, the Arctic seed vault forms a sort of planetary insurance policy”.

Constructed as a sort of last-ditch effort at protecting plants from extinction, the seed bank is meant to serve as a backup for gene banks like ICARDA, Lainoff said. The seeds include samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions. But that centre has been damaged by the war – while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008, stores more than 850,000 seed samples from nations all over the world.

Now in its fourth year, the Syrian civil war has killed an estimated 250,000 people while driving more than 11 million from their homes, with 7.6 million displaced inside the country, said Reuters. They are due to be sent once the paperwork is completed, according to a spokesperson.

But as CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports, the story starts 3,000 miles away in the city of Aleppo, Syria, at a research center which has been developing crops – especially grains – for dryland farming.

“ICARDA, the global Center for Agricultural Research in The Dry Areas, had taken the precaution of duplicating their seed collection and placing a duplicate copy up in Svalbard by the North Pole, for safe keeping, just for a circumstance like this”, Fowler stated during an interview with told CBS News. Luckily, the vault is replenished constantly and the withdrawal shouldn’t cause any vulnerability.

[Images via Dalishe / Shutterstock and Shutterstock].