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.

What if there is no food?

I'm disturbed, today, and this post is a depature from my usual ramble. I read a newspaper article about people in Haiti having to eat mud 'cookies' to survive.

Now, starvation is not new. Famine has always been with us, somewhere on the globe. But it left me wondering.

My first reaction was 'What kind of government lets this happen to its people?' I do wonder about that, but again - it's not new that these places have miserable, corrupt governments. It's a cinch that the rich and those in authority are getting plenty of food. Otherwise, something would be done about it.

But what can we do, as just people, to prepare for this kind of thing?

Why does famine happen? Weather is a big reason - drought and floods, mostly, bringing along disease and wiping out the crops. Insect invasion - locusts can strip an entire region in no time. People invasion - war, genocide, power struggles.

In Haiti's case, the final straw was a hurricane, although they've been in trouble for years. So how do we prepare? I don't mean in Haiti or Bangladesh or Ethiopa; we send them relief but don't do anything about the corrupt governments, so we're throwing the relief down the proverbial drain. But what about ourselves?

Any of these things can happen here. And if it's severe enough, I suspect we have one of those governments that will not worry about certain segments of the country. We may be on our own.

If a drought occurs for several years, our precious backyard gardens will not be alive to feed us. The farmers will not have crops. The animals will die on the hills and in the feedlots.

How do we prepare? In the end, are even we at the mercy of nature? Are there ideas I'm missing?