Credit: Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Riccardo Gangale The portal building and the entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The current shipment for deposit brings ICARDA back up to about 100 000 seeds, the amount it had stored prior to withdrawing seeds as a result of the Syrian civil war. Reconstruction efforts are taking place in Lebanon and Morocco among other places. ICARDA has retrieved seeds in 2015, 20 to reconstruct a seed collection lost in Syria. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is depositing roughly 6 000 bags of seed. Another 50 species not yet in the vault are being deposited from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Germany. This latest deposit will add 150 new species, most of them fodder plants from the Australian Pastures Genebank. The seed collection in Svalbard is growing steadily. ‘The fact that the seed reserve destroyed in Syria during the civil war is now being systematically rebuilt using seeds retrieved from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is proof that the vault serves as insurance for current and future food supply and local food security,’ said Ms Tvinnereim. Each time we deposit new seeds in Svalbard, it enhances global food security for the future,’ said Minister of International Development Anne Beathe Tvinnereim. The preservation and use of local seeds is essential for safeguarding local food production. ‘Seed banks are of crucial importance at a time when at least 811 million people do not know if they will get the food they need each day. But paradoxically, it is poor small-scale farmers who are most vulnerable to hunger in many countries, said Borch. In developing countries, small-scale farmers produce 80 % of all food. ‘Small-scale farming accounts for 75 % of the world’s cultivated land. ‘Ensuring increased food production in Norway will require new, climate-resilient crop varieties and plants that can make more climate-friendly production possible.’ ‘The wide diversity of plant species in the seed vault is also essential for Norwegian agriculture,’ said Minister of Agriculture and Food Borch. Seed boxes from many gene banks and many countries stored side by side on the shelves in the Seed Vault. A total of 89 gene banks around the world have sent samples to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest and most diverse collection of seeds. The vault safeguards more than 1.1 million seed samples from nearly 6 000 plant species of importance to food and agriculture worldwide. Representatives of the Slovakian Research Institute of Plant Production will also take part. Minister of Agriculture and Food Sandra Borch and Minister of International Development Anne Beathe Tvinnereim will both be present in Svalbard, along with representatives of Crop Trust (Executive Director Stefan Schmitz) and NordGen (Managing Director Lise Lykke Steffensen), which operate the seed vault in partnership with Norway. Some 22 000 new seed samples from 10 gene banks in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, the Middle East and Europe will be deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on 14 February 11:00 CET.
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