Doom’s Day Seed Vault in Arctic

Our planet’s climate is changing. In the past century, global temperatures have risen by 0.7 degrees and continue to rise. If temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius, and if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets consequently melt, then the sudden rise in sea levels can lead to cataclysmic floods as outlined in Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. What if massive amounts of methane gas — a greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide — are released from the massive reserves of frozen methane locked in the world’s deep oceans and permafrost? In fact, exactly cascades of methane reserves rapidly warmed the Earth many million years ago, replacing an Ice Age with a period of tropical heat. This scenario can happen within this century itself, warn scientists. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions, excessive urbanization dismantling rural livelihoods and deteriorating ecosystems bring us face-to-face with one of the daunting challenges of today – how to feed a growing hungry world population in the context of climate change.

Front Entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via Wikipedia

What if predictions of near apocalypse by fourth assessment report by the United nations come true?

In the middle of an ice mountain in the Longyearbyen village in the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group, a Global Seed Vault was opened last year, to preserve  millions of pure, non-GMO seeds for a possible catastrophic event that would require re-seeding the entire planet. Round the year, the natural temperature here is minus 4 degrees C, and it has been further lowered to minus 18 degrees. Most of these varieties don’t grow in fields anymore, since the farmers have replaced them over time with hybrid varieties. But these are the basic material to tap into in future, if you want to improve a crop that can resist drought or survive disease.

India has “donated” seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, yet it has not officially deposited any for safe-keeping. According to The Hindu Business Online, the National Biodiversity Authority, the apex body whose permission needs to be sought before such genetic material is to be transferred outside the country, was merely informed of the government decision, and the worrisome matter is the absence of Standard Agreement between the Depositor (Government  or any of the agricultural institutes) and the Norwegian government.

Funding this project is Bill Gates along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway. The vault houses a collection of 100 million seeds from over 100 countries. Heaven knows, whatever leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to support on one hand the proliferation of Terminator patented seeds that destroys the plant seed varieties and simultaneously invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future’ (as quoted from the press release).

But for the farmers who have for centuries experimented and developed new crop varieties, the Vault has taken knowledge from them and subsequently denied them access to the stored seeds.

Read also: Impact of Genetcally Modified Seeds on Health and Environment