Originally published February 19 2006
Food project aims to protect mankind against famine
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organization promoting the project, discusses the importance of a room constructed near the North Pole known as the doomsday vault, which will store more than 2 million seeds that represent the global variety of known crops.
WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity.
The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops.
It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies.
"If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.
New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists.
The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen.
The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors.
The vault's seed collection, made up of duplicates of those already held at other seed banks, will represent the products of some 10,000 years of plant breeding by the world's farmers.
Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in Spitsbergen are around -18 �C.
Norway first proposed the project in the 1980s but it was shelved because of security concerns: under an international treaty the Soviet Union had access to Spitsbergen at the time.
With the end of the cold war and the signing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which gives legal protection to national crops, the door was open for the idea's revival.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml