More Than 200,000 Seed & Crop Varieties Will Be Stored In Arctic Vault By End Of January - The Hindu

MEXICO CITY: At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years.

The cornucopia of rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and a host of other food, forage and agroforestry plants is to be safeguarded in the facility, which was created as a repository of last resort for humanity’s agricultural heritage. The seeds will be shipped to the village of Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where the vault has been constructed in a mountain deep inside the Arctic permafrost. The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault will open on 26 February 2008, according to Eurekalert, the news service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This first installment from the CGIAR collections will contain duplicates from international agricultural research centers based in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant varieties in crop genebanks, which are widely viewed as the foundation of global efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity.

“Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most important crop species,” said Emile Frison, Director General of Rome-based Bioversity International, which coordinates CGIAR crop diversity initiatives.

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http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/015200801240921.htm

"The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community..." - you would not hear this coming from the regime in Washington - service - forget it - they would have privatized it and let Monsanto or one of the other notorious seed manipulators provide and manage it. From a very bitter citizen.

"The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community"

What happened to the US being "a shining beacon on the hill" or whatever? Arent we supposed to be leading by example? We could learn a thing or two from those "socialists" Scandanavians.

So Monsanto hires one of the ex-CIA manned companies to "fix" this little problem. The nuns with the heirloom farm animals were wiped out by a fire a few years ago. I thought this then. Voting machines, GM and cloned foods, animal and vegetable, medical and pharmaceutical research (and the NYSE?).

Reminds me of a guy speaking on TV from a US university, who said that it not a matter of if animals get rights but when. Guess he hasn't been reading any news. Forever and more pointedly recently humans around the world have been losing their rights to phony terror schemes IMF, CIA, Multi-national Corporations who buy politicians. I am always amazed when I get up and DU is still here.

It's so "perma" that permafrost.