Jan 23, 2008, 18:28 GMT
New York - Thousands of seeds, plants and crop varieties from all continents - the world's agricultural heritage - will be shipped later this month to a vault in the Arctic Circle to be preserved for thousands of years, organizers said.
The collection of more than 200,000 crop varieties will be stored in the Norwegian-built Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), which will open on February 28.
Seeds from rice, wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and other crops will be shipped to the village of Longyearbyen on Norway's Svalbard archipelago to vaults built deep under the Arctic permafrost.
The seeds come from the vast collection maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which has centres around the world. CGIAR maintains more than 600,000 plant varieties.
The organization's major centre in Mexico City maintains a bank of 150,000 unique samples of wheat and its relatives from more than 100 countries and a collection of maize that represents nearly 90 per cent of maize diversity in the Americas.
The first shipment to the Arctic site left Mexico City Tuesday, and future shipments to the Arctic will come from 11 locations around the world.
Seed duplicates from CGIAR included in the first shipment to the Arctic were provided by agricultural research centres in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Syria.
'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 centres, 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.
Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will assist in the shipments to the Arctic, said, 'The CGIAR collections are the 'crown jewels' of international agriculture.'
'They include the world's largest and most diverse collections of rice, wheat, maize and beans. Many traditional land races of these crops would have been lost had they not been collected and stored in the genebanks,' Fowler said.
Genebanks are repositories of living resources used by research centres to combat major threats to food production.
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