The Yale Globalist - Frozen Food: More than a Subzero Stash

Frozen Food: More than a Subzero Stash
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores the genetic materials of the world's plants.

Saturday, 04 April 2009 | Rae Bichell

Only 110 kilometers from the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault emerges out of the otherwise uniform Norwegian tundra, its metal and fiberoptic façade giving off a greenish glow in the snow. Occasionally visited by wandering polar bears, the Vault is monitored by satellite and sealed with a series of airtight doors that recede within a permafrost mountain. The purpose behind the steel and concrete construction? To preserve the seeds of more than 100,000 plant species from across the world.

To the uninitiated, plant genes may not seem worthy of the world’s urgent attention. After all, rapidly increasing rates of obesity signal an over-nutrition crisis. Abundant corn crops bear ear after ear, but all of the same kind of corn.

According to Ola Westengen, who manages the daily operations of the Vault from the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, this lack of variety is precisely the problem. “What people fail to realize is that around the world we depend on agricultural resources that came from outside our country,” he said. “This goes if you are in the U.S., Norway, or Kenya: You really rely on genetic diversity to produce healthy crops.”

Genetic diversity is crucial even for the most abundant crops. It is necessary for continued adaptation and evolution—the greater the variety in specific plant traits, the greater the chance that one of those traits will confer some advantage on the species. In the past century, the United States has lost 93 percent of genetic diversity in some crops. American apple varieties have been decimated: 6,800 out of 7,100 varieties existing in the 1800s have since become extinct.

Genetic erosion has made fruits and vegetables more vulnerable to pests and farmers ever more dependent on pesticides. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds, “the world’s most important natural resource,” according to Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop diversity Trust behind the Vault’s founding.

Food for the Future

Agriculture finds itself in a state of emergency: the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that by 2050 the world’s population will outstrip its food resources. “The problem isn’t just rising populations,” Fowler said. “It’s also climate change, water shortage, and energy restraints all combining to create unprecedented challenges for agriculture.” Even if genetic variation were not in decline among plant species, global crops are simply incapable of producing enough for the population of nine billion projected for 2050, no matter how high-yielding they may be.

Gene banks like the one in Svalbard may be the solution, addressing both genetic erosion and the food crisis. The Vault’s gene database will preserve existing diversity, provide the material required to revive extinct breeds, and allow plant breeders to engineer new crop varieties better-suited to the environment by pulling traits from higher-yielding, drought-resistant, or pest-resistant breeds.

“Where do all those traits come from?” Fowler asked. “They don’t descend from the heavens. They’re traits found in older varieties or botanical relatives of agricultural crops, and these are typically stored in seed banks.”

The Vault is Born

Housing the earth’s most important natural resource takes more than just a locked freezer, and the world has Norway to thank for it. “The country that provided the Vault for the international community should really be commended on behalf of the world,” Mwila said of the Norwegian government. Norway single-handedly paid for the facility’s $9 million construction, about the cost of buying an ice cream cone for each Norwegian citizen.

From 1984 until the construction of the Svalbard Vault, the five Nordic countries maintained a collaborative gene bank in an abandoned mine shaft. A combination of funding problems, poor infrastructure, and inadequate technology has left gene bank facilities around the world unsuited to house their highly sensitive materials. In the Philippines, a typhoon flooded the national gene bank with two meters of water and mud. In Afghanistan and Iraq, war and looting left gene banks in shambles, while a power outage in Cameroon exposed the countries’ delicate seeds to ruinously high temperatures.

“Every time a gene bank somewhere catches on fire or gets flooded or gets involved in a civil war, we’ve squandered resources that we’re absolutely going to need,” Fowler said. “Would the world really forgive us as scientists for not taking a bit more care in ensuring the safety of these materials?”

In 2005, plagued by genetic erosion and damaged facilities, a team of 15 international agricultural resource centers drafted a letter to the Norwegian government asking for its help in the creation of the first global gene bank. The world needed a safe place to store its seed collections, and Svalbard, Norway, was suited to the task. The building is capable of holding 4.5 million seed samples, is located in an area of unparalleled security, and is far removed from the sea and the water’s potentially damaging effects. It is capable of keeping its contents well-insulated for millennia. With 70,000 new seed samples arriving in February alone, the Vault continues to fill shelf after shelf with precious genetic material—one of the largest biological rescue programs in history.

The Vault is not a typical food storage system. In order to enter the Vault, facility workers have to pass through a series of airtight doors, each with a different key code. “It’s a beautiful work. There’s a level of science fiction to it, a James Bond quality, but once you get in there, it’s a pretty normal underground building,” said Westengen. “Normal” in this case involves disaster-proof equipment like the concave wall at the end of the entrance corridor capable of deflecting nuclear shock waves. Even better, it barely costs anything to maintain—less than two percent of the Global Crop diversity Trust’s annual expenses.

Nestled up by the North Pole, the subzero stash in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault could be the world’s saving grace, perhaps preventing the expected gradual decline in biodiversity. One thing is certain: it is the most effective freezer on the face of the Earth.

Underground, Under Law

The Vault’s seamless functioning today sometimes obscures the extensive effort involved in its establishment. A joint effort between the Global Crop diversity Trust, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Norwegian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the Vault represents the culmination of years of negotiations.

Until the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which established an international framework for the exchange of genetic resources, property rights were one of the greatest concerns in the world of crop breeding and bio-preservation. Some of the most valuable plant breeding takes place in the fields, where farmers in developing countries naturally combine successful crops. In more technologically advanced countries, a more sterile lab process is conducted. “Patents on genetic resources prompted a reaction in developing countries,” Westengen said. “It was felt that is was very unjust that multinational companies can make money from things that were developed by five generations of poor farmers.”

The Vault, however, solves these problems by offering something between a frozen time capsule and a high-security bank. Fowler refers to it as a “massive safe deposit box” and “gigantic library” that stores information for the international community without interfering with the depositors’ ownership.

In addition to protecting ownership rights, the Vault is “one of the best examples of collaboration between countries,” Westengen said. “This is one of the few positive, long-term, no-lose cooperative ventures that virtually all the countries in the world are participating in,” Fowler said. “I can’t think of any projects that are as long-term as this one, and I can think of very few that are so obviously positive.” The Svalbard Vault successfully aligned the interests of developing and developed countries, creating the kind of interaction that the United Nations strives for but rarely achieves. On the icy shelves of the Vault, countries are represented not by GdP, export rate, or military might but instead by tiny, frozen seeds.

Rae Bichell is a freshman in Davenport College.

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