Saving Seeds

No, not saving seeds as in reserving from your crop so you can plant next year. That's good to do, too.

This is saving seeds in the doomsday-apocolypse-kind-of-way. I didn't know we did this. That's "we" as in the human race. Yep, this is a joint effort, world-wide. There are "seed banks" scattered around the planet, where the seeds for our food are safely stored in case of disaster.

Cool, isn't it?

The reason I heard about it is that a new seed bank has just opoened in Norway: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built deep in the permafrost in a remote Arctic mountain. It can withstand earthquakes, storms, and nuclear attacks.

You know, in case there are any survivors of said nuclear attack and they want to eat. Of course, we have to hope that someone with the keys to the place also survives, but that's another issue...

There are other seed banks, not all in great places and some have been destroyed (such as one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan - guess who might have, indirectly, had something to do with that?). A bank in the Phillipines was flooded after a typhoon.

So it's important where these are built. Having worked on the Yucca Mountain Project - our feeble attempt to find some place to bury nuclear waste - I have a good idea of hard it is to find these places. There are so many factors to consider.

But the idea is great. The seeds will be safe and people can withdraw them as needed (no, it's not necessary to wait for the nuclear attack). Any country in the world can deposit seeds for no cost.

It's funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, founded by U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International.

Now for the cynicism: we need to make sure Monsanto doesn't have any ownership in this thing. They'll patent all the seeds and indenture future generations who need to make withdrawals.

Tomorrow, I'll get more cynical and talk a little about the "diversity" side of this issue.