The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on an arctic mountain on the isolated Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, protects approximately 1.2 million seed samples, making it the world’s largest collection of crop diversity in any one location.
Ghana’s deposit was created by the West African country’s Plant Research Institute, CSIR-PGRRI, and includes vital crops such as maize, rice, eggplant and black-eyed peas.
The Crop Trust, which runs the seed vault, claims to have seeds from almost every country on the planet. Ghana joins African countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia in making a deposit.
“This, our first backup, provides a sense of relief that our crop-diverse collections are well on their way to being secured in perpetuity for the benefit of all humanity.” according to Daniel Kotey, Senior Research Scientist of CSIR-PGRRI.
The Doomsday Vault is an idea born out of fear of global warming. Basically, a consortium of scientists is running what they believe is an answer: a deep freeze for thousands of seed samples meant to serve as a backup to deal with worst-case scenarios. The Global Seed Vault is buried inside a mountain in the Arctic’s Svalbard Islands.
Seed Vault has enabled genebanks from around the world to store copies of their seed variety for 15 years. With the addition of this latest donation, the Seed Vault now has “copies” of more than 1.2 million seed samples safely stored in genebanks spread across 74 nations.
This diversity is necessary to enable agro-food systems to respond to other environmental concerns, such as a rapidly changing climate.