Global Seed Vault cannot replace on-farm conservation
On 26 February 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was officially opened in Svalbard, Norway. Nestled in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, the vault is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. The idea is that if seeds in existing collections are lost, for example as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.
However, this focus on ex situ collections in genes banks is highly flawed if it creates the delusion that this is the ultimate approach to seed conservation. In situ or on-farm conservation, where farmers have for generations been preserving seed and crop diversity, is a much more important priority, and yet this diversity for food and agriculture is being increasingly eroded and destroyed. In addition, the gene bank strategy raises serious concerns on issues related to ownership and control, access and benefit-sharing, with farmers sidelined and their contributions to agricultural biodiversity ignored.
It is of great concern that such a venture was realized with hardly any public knowledge or discussion given the ecological, social and political implications.
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ETC Group
26 February 2008
www.etcgroup.org
Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault: The Global Seed Vault Raises Political/Conservation Debate
The swarm of media attention focusing on today’s opening of the Global Seed Vault in Norway’s high Arctic may overshadow an even bigger news story. Yesterday, 26 February, the Norwegian government pledged to give 0.1% of money spent on commercial seed sales to support Farmers’ Rights, and challenged other governments to do the same. The critical message is that even the most secure gene bank storage is not the ultimate solution. Governments must provide support to farmers to improve local conservation and breeding, and help them obtain access to far away seed accessions. Global food security depends upon a coherent in situ (on-farm) and ex situ (gene bank) strategy. The need to support farmers’ on-farm conservation and breeding work is urgent.
On the occasion of the opening of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, ETC Group releases a new Communique, "Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault: The Global Seed Vault Raises Political/Conservation Debate."
Go here to view the 10-page report:
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=674
Issue: The opening of the Global Seed Vault in Norway’s high Arctic February 26 closes a 30-year campaign for a World Gene Bank – and opens an overdue debate on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources and the need to support on-farm conservation strategies.
Stakes: Less than a third of the 6.5 million seed samples now in storage are probably unique. Of these, perhaps two-thirds are in urgent need of regeneration. While the Global Seed Vault is a step in the right direction, many vital ex situ gene banks are in desperate straits. As much as half of the world’s crop diversity may still be in farmers’ fields protected only by the family and the community.
Policies: Serious work is needed on the implementation of the rolling plan of action for the conservation of plant genetic resources. The next meeting of the Governing Body for the FAO Treaty should devote special attention to the issue of in situ conservation and the urgent need for a financial facility to support this conservation. The Governing Body should also address the issue of accession duplication as it relates to the Global Seed Vault. Later this year, ETC Group will release additional studies that examine the relationship between the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the International Seed Treaty.
Forum: Agriculture is on the agenda of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in May and at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Bonn in May. Although the Governing Body of the FAO Treaty won’t meet until early 2009, the opening of the Global Seed Vault affords an opportunity for governments and farmers’ organizations to commit to establishing a long-term strategy for the conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources on the farm.
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New from GRAIN
February 2007
http://www.grain.org/nfg/?id=557
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36
FAULTS IN THE VAULT: NOT EVERYONE IS CELEBRATING SVALBARD
After months of extraordinary publicity, and with the apparently unanimous support of the international scientific community, the "Global Seed Vault" was officially opened today on an island in Svalbard, Norway. Nestled inside a mountain, the Vault is basically a giant icebox able to hold 4.5 million seed samples in cold storage for humanity’s future needs. The idea is that if some major disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout from a nuclear war, countries could turn to the Vault to pull out seeds to restart food production. However, this "ultimate safety net" for the biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant — indeed, only — approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers’ fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the a! ccess problems that plague the international ex situ system.
FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS
Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and one of the main proponents of the Vault, says that the initiative "will rescue the most globally important developing-country collections of the world’s 21 most important food crops." While it’s true that crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected, as irreplaceable diversity is being lost at an alarming scale, relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer.
The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in genebanks of developing countries. So the issue is not about being for or against genebanks, it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has a lot of inherent problems.
The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic is that as people’s traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs — seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population — the old ones have to be put away as "raw material" for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the world’s original, and ongoing, plant breeders. To access the seeds, you have to be integrated into a whole institutional framework that most farmers on the planet simply don’t even know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ strategy caters to the needs of scientists, not farmers.
In addition, the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers’ seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself. In the case of most so-called public genebanks, the seeds are said to become part of "the public domain" if not "national sovereignty" (which increasingly translates to state ownership). The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global genebanks for the world’s most widely used staple food crops, has even set up a legal arrangement of "trusteeship" that it exercises over the treasure chest of farmers’ seeds that it holds "on behalf of" the international community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers whom they took the seeds from in the first place if this was okay and they left farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.
The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these problems. Because it is a "doomsday" backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway’s history, even though the facility’s feasibility study assured that "there is no volcanic or significant seismic activity" in the area. But more troubling than any technical matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands.
ACCESS AND BENEFIT ILLS
The Vault is not immune from the terrible controversies over access to and benefits from the world’s precious agricultural biodiversity. The Norwegian government is ultimately responsible for the Vault and is currently regarded as fair and trustworthy, but there is no guarantee that the country’s policies won’t change. This is acknowledged by the Norwegian government itself, which has provided agreements to be signed with depositors that last only ten years and that include clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change. Probably more important, the Norwegian government will not be making decisions autonomously. Decisions will be shared with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a private entity with strong private and corporate funding.
There are already some access issues with the Vault. For all practical purposes, seeds cannot be stored in the Vault unless they come from genebanks that have successfully duplicated their samples in another bank. More than this, depositors are not allowed to put in seeds that are already stored in the Vault. The Standard Depositor Agreement states that the "Depositor shall deposit only samples of plant genetic resources that are, to the best of the Depositor’s knowledge, … samples of plant genetic resources that have not yet been deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault" and that "the Depositor recognizes the right of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food to refuse to accept samples for deposit or to terminate the deposit of samples already deposited if the samples constitute duplicates of materials already held in deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault".
As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at Svalbard, or give permission for someone else to. With parcels of CGIAR seeds already arriving in Norway, this means that the CGIAR Centres will be the depositors for most of the seeds held in the Vault, giving them almost exclusive control over access. Indeed, as the Seed Vault feasibility study indicates, it was "assumed that the [Vault] would begin operations with a nucleus consisting of the CGIAR materials and those of certain key national
genebanks and that this (sic) ‘founding collections’ would discourage subsequent unnecessary duplication of materials within the Svalbard facility." Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have registered with the Vault so far, only three are national seed banks from developing countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR’s private stash.
In practical terms this means that many developing countries that want to duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able to do so directly. It would be seen as a duplicate of what the CGIAR has already deposited. They will not, therefore, have direct access to seeds in the Vault that may have been collected from their country. This might not seem to pose many concerns right now because governments have different backup sources for seeds but the context would be vastly different under any doomsday scenario where decisions would have to be taken over a critical, unique resource which suddenly only remains in Svalbard. For farmers there is pretty much no possibility for direct access to seeds in the Vault.
But doomsday aside, it is important to ask who really benefits from the ex situ system that the Vault contributes to. As the few transnational seed corporations that control over half the world’s US$30 billion annual commercial seed market are increasingly buying up public plant breeding programmes and governments are pulling out of plant breeding, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the very same corporations that are at the roots of crop diversity destruction.
STOP DESTROYING DIVERSITY INSTEAD!
If governments were truly interested in conserving biodiversity for food and agriculture, they would do two things. First, they would, as a central priority, focus their efforts on supporting diversity in their countries’ farms and markets rather than only betting on big centralised genebanks. This means leaving seeds in the hand of local farmers, with their active and innovative farming practices, respecting and promoting the rights of communities to conserve, produce, breed, exchange and sell seeds. But this won’t happen until governments turn agricultural policy and regulations upside down and stop pushing for industrialisation and feeding corporate-controlled global markets at the expense of letting farmers freely feed their own communities and countries. This means making food sovereignty the foundation of farm policy instead of continuously pushing agriculture further down the destructive path of corporate-led global market integration.
Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some hypothetic emergency. The real urgency, however, is to let diversity live — in farms, in the hand of farmers, and across people-controlled and community-oriented markets — today.
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GOING FURTHER:
Aasa Christine Stoltz, "Norway’s biggest quake hits Svalbard archipelago,"
Reuters, 21 February 2008.
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2173668320080221
Norwegian government and the Svalbard vault:
http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/
Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Svalbard vault:
http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=216
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
http://www.planttreaty.org/
GRAIN, "The FAO seed treaty: from farmers’ rights to breeders’ privileges,"
Seedling, October 2005.
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=411
Center for International Environment and Development Studies et al, "Study to assess the feasibility of establishing a Svalbard Arctic seed depository for the international community", prepared for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, 14 September 2004.
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-vault/publ
ications.html?id=463313
Svalbard Global Seed Vault – Standard Depositor Agreement.
http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?page=depositor_guidelines
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GRAIN, Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard, "Against the grain", February 2007, http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36. Also available in PDF format: http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36&pdf
Disponible en Español – http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=37
Bientôt disponible en français – http://www.grain.org/fr/
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