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Global Seed Vault cannot replace on-farm conservation On
26 February 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was officially opened
in 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. With
best wishes,
The
swarm of media attention focusing on today's opening of the Global Seed
Vault in 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." Click here to view the 10-page report Issue:
The opening of the Global Seed Vault in 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
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 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 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 genebanks and that
this (sic) 'founding collections' would discourage subsequent unnecessary
duplication of materials within the In practical terms
this means that many developing countries that want to duplicate their
collections in 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. ================================================= GOING FURTHER: Norwegian
government and the Svalbard vault Global
Crop Diversity Trust and the Svalbard vault International
Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture GRAIN,
"The FAO seed treaty: from farmers' rights to breeders' privileges," Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Standard Depositor Agreement. ================================================= GRAIN, Faults in
the vault: not everyone is celebrating Disponible en Español - http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=37 Bientôt disponible en français - http://www.grain.org/fr/ ===========================================================
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