‘Noah’s Ark’ for world’s crop seeds to open soon

IN a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirrelling away the world’s crop seeds in case of disaster.

Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island, around 1,000km from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah’s Ark of the plant kingdom.

It is the brainchild of a soft-spoken academic from Tennessee in the US, who is passionate about securing food for the masses, and will back up seed stores around the world that are vulnerable to loss through war or disaster.

A 20m-long concrete entrance, still under scaffolding, juts out of the snow-dusted mountain above the coal-mining town of Longyearbyen.

It is reached by a switchback road rising to 120m above sea level, offering spectacular views of the fjord below and snow-capped Arctic mountains beyond.

Visitors descend through the mouth of a gently sloping, 40m steel tube into the frosty cavern which smells of new cement and is dotted with portable lamps as work progresses for February’s opening.

“There aren’t going to be any better storage conditions than what we will provide here,” founder Cary Fowler said during a recent visit to the site in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway.

“This is a safety deposit box, like in a bank, where you put your valuables.”

Although this is one of the world’s most northerly settlements, an electric freezer will be used to keep the seeds in the three-chambered, concrete-lined vault at -18C.

If the power fails, permafrost will still keep them frozen, but not as deeply.

The project is at the heart of an effort by Mr Fowler’s foundation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to safeguard strains of 21 essential crops, such as wheat, barley and rice.

Rice alone exists in about 120,000 varieties.

Ultimately, it is part of the world battle against hunger, as crop insecurity mainly hurts poor nations.

“Crops important to the poorest of the poor have really been neglected,” said Roy Steiner, an official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided financial support.

“Millet and crops like cow pea receive so little attention.”

Mr Fowler calls such varieties “orphan crops” because they have no one to take care of them.

The aim is to preserve genetic diversity, needed by plant breeders in the future to produce varieties able to adapt to challenges like climate change.

“The longest viability under these conditions would be that of sorghum — about 19,500 years,” Mr Fowler said.

Other varieties will need to be replaced more often.