Operators noted that while a steady flow of seed deposits continues each year, many crop diversity collections remain at risk due to limited resources and underinvestment in genebanks.
OSLO, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- Twenty genebanks across the world deposited seed samples at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week, contributing 21,647 accessions to the world's largest backup repository of crop diversity and bringing its total holdings to 1,378,238 samples across 68 deposits, according to a press release issued by the facility on Wednesday.
The vault's operators said the latest deposits included culinary staples such as Filipino rice and Peruvian chili peppers, alongside cultural and regional crops like Ecuador's chocho bean and Moroccan lavender. A major shipment came from the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) genebank in Tanzania, which sent the largest-ever deposit of traditional African vegetable seeds to the Arctic facility, including amaranth, jute mallow, Bambara groundnut, African eggplant, and okra.
The International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia deposited new samples of trees, shrubs, legumes, and African forages, among them Tripsacum dactyloides, a wild relative of maize.
"Samples from this genus have not been secured in the Seed Vault before, despite its close evolutionary link to one of the world's most important staple crops," said Asmund Asdal, coordinator of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Operators noted that while a steady flow of seed deposits continues each year, many crop diversity collections remain at risk due to limited resources and underinvestment in genebanks. With the latest intake, more than half of the seeds stored at WorldVeg's African genebank are now safely duplicated in Svalbard.
Established in 2008 and located deep in Arctic permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is jointly managed by the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and the Crop Trust. The facility is designed to safeguard up to 4.5 million distinct seed varieties, serving as an insurance policy for global agriculture against threats such as war, climate change, and natural disasters. ■
