African Seed Collection Kept At Norway’s Seed Vault

Seven thousand unique seed samples from more than 36 African nations were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility being built on a remote island in the Arctic Circle as a safe haven for global agricultural heritage.

The shipment, which was sent by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, south-west Nigeria, consists of thousands of duplicates of unique varieties of domesticated and wild cowpea, maize, soybean, and Bambara groundnut.

A statement issued Saturday by IITA, said the seeds from the IITA genebank in Ibadan, were packed in 21 boxes weighing a total of 330 kg.

“The processing by IITA staff took several months, and the boxes were packaged over a three-day period, with 10 staff checking the accession list, reporting errors, and adjusting the inventory, as needed”.

IITA said the vault is being built by the Norwegian government as service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, Global Crop Diversity Trust, would fund its operation. The vault will open on February 26, 2008.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Doomsday Vault being dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen near Svalbard will be the ultimate safety net for the world’s most important natural resource.

The statement said gene banks, such as IITA’s, were vulnerable to a wide range of threats-civil strife, war, natural catastrophes, and more routinely but no less damagingly, poor management, lack of adequate funding, and equipment failures. Unique varieties of most important crops are lost whenever any such disaster strikes, and therefore securing duplicates of all collections in a global facility provides an insurance policy for the world’s food supply.

“IITA’s gene bank houses the world’s largest collection of cowpea, with over 15,000 unique varieties from 88 countries around the world,” said Dr Dominique Dumet, gene bank manager at IITA.

Source African Press Agency

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