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10 Rice Today  April-June 2008

On Monday 21 January 2008,ight LH3134 left Manila,Philippines, for Oslo, Norway,counting more than 35 million

grains of rice among its cargo.Headed not for Scandinavian dinnerplates, these grains would continue onto the Norwegian island of Svalbard,north of the Arctic Circle, only 1,000kilometers from the North Pole.

The seeds, from the InternationalRice Genebank of the InternationalRice Research Institute (IRRI),represented 70,180 samples of traditional and modern rice varietiesand their wild relatives bound forthe newly constructed SvalbardGlobal Seed Vault. In total, morethan 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America, andthe Middle East—drawn from seed

collections maintained by centersof the Consultative Group onInternational Agricultural Research(CGIAR)—were shipped to Svalbard.

IRRI’s contribution includedthe rst box placed in storage by Norwegian Prime Minister JensStoltenberg and 2004 Nobel PeacePrize Laureate Wangari Maathaiduring the vault’s opening ceremony on 26 February 2008. PrimeMinister Stoltenberg describedthe vault, which cost around US$9million to build, as “a Noah’s Ark for our biological heritage.”

The facility—dubbed the“doomsday vault” by the world’smedia—is owned and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture andFood on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway and was established as aservice to the world community.The Nordic Gene Bank will operatethe facility and maintain a public

online database of samples.Constructed in the permafrost

of the Svalbard mountains, the vault is designed to store duplicatesof seeds from seed collectionsaround the globe. RuaraidhSackville Hamilton, head of theInternational Rice Genebank, saidthat the new vault provides the“ultimate safety backup, located where all risks—political, geological,climatic—are extremely low.”

He added, “For long-termsurvival, seeds need to be storedat low temperature. This is mosteconomical in a place like Svalbard, where the ambient temperature islow and the insulation is high.”

Further, he said, the risksfaced by IRRI and Svalbard arenot just independent but almostmutually exclusive. It is almostinconceivable that any risk couldsimultaneously destroy thetwo copies of the collection.

svalbard global seed Vault:the number

The vault is located 120 meters into therock, ensuring that the vault rooms

will remain naturally frozen even if themechanical cooling system fails or if external air temperatures rise because of climate change.

The distance from the front door of theportal building to the back of the vault is145.9 meters. The width of each vault is9.5–10 meters and the height is 6 meters.Each vault is approximately 27 meterslong.

The vault has the capacity to store 4.5million seed samples. Each sample containsan average of 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds can be stored. The seedswill be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsiusin specially-designed four-ply foil packagesthat will be placed in sealed boxes. Thelow temperature and low moisture level will ensure that the seeds stay viable fordecades, centuries, or even thousands of years.

The ultimate backupThe Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed as a last-resort backup or Earth’s most important crops, has

accepted its rst samples, including more than 70,000 diferent types o rice

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11Rice Today  April-June 2008

IRRI itself holds the world’slargest and most diverse collectionof rice: nearly 110,000 accessionsfrom 123 countries—around 20% of the total holdings of rice conservedin all genebanks around the world.

Rice agriculture depends onthe vast diversity seen in the rice

genebank. If a new rice diseaseappears, researchers can search thegenebank for resistant varieties. Thegenes required to make rice moretolerant of drought, for example,exist within the varieties containedin the collection. The genebank contains the genetic diversity weneed to respond to changes inclimate, consumer expectations,agricultural technologies, andgovernment priorities.

“Any new rice research project

or rice breeding program typically starts with a scientist asking theseed bank to supply the types of rice required for their research,”said Dr. Sackville Hamilton.

The immeasurable value of seed banks has been seen many timesin the past. One notable exampleis the use of Cambodian rice varieties stored in IRRI’s genebank to re-establish Cambodia’s riceindustry after it was devastatedduring years of civil strife in the1970s, when a starving populationate the nation’s seed stocks.

“The CGIAR collections arethe ‘crown jewels’ of internationalagriculture,” said Cary Fowler,executive director of the Global CropDiversity Trust, which covered thecosts of preparing, packaging, andtransporting CGIAR seeds to the

 Arctic and will provide support forongoing operations. “They includethe world’s largest and most diversecollections of rice, wheat, maize, and beans. Many traditional landracesof these crops would have beenlost had they not been collectedand stored in the genebanks.”

IRRI Director General RobertZeigler, who attended the vaultopening, pointed out that Svalbard was neither built to make upfor low standards nor an excuseto lower existing standards.

“If we assemble all the world’scrop diversity in Svalbard and usethat as an excuse to stop conservingit elsewhere, we’d be in an even worsesituation, since then all availablediversity could be destroyed by a single event,” said Dr. Zeigler.

“Moreover, the seeds in Svalbard arenot accessible to anyone except thedepositor. To realize the potential benets of crop diversity, our farmers,scientists, and breeders must be ableto use the seed easily. Seed bankssuch as IRRI’s must therefore bemaintained at locations around the world where they are most needed.”

IRRI’s collection is itself protected to the highest possiblestandards. The facility is raisedabove ood levels and is designedto withstand an earthquake of up to7 on the Richter scale or a nuclearaccident in a warship in Manilaharbor 60 km away. IRRI has twolevels of electricity backup—one setof generators for the whole Instituteand one specically for the genebank.To address the risk of equipmentfailure, the Institute maintains backup systems, for example, usingtwo compressors for cooling, so that,if one fails, the second takes over.

Spare parts of all key operationalcomponents are kept on-site.

“The high standard of construction and protection wasconrmed during the devastatingTyphoon Milenyo of October 2006, which caused severe damage tothe Philippine national seed bank situated a few kilometers away  but left our facility unscathed,”said Dr. Sackville Hamilton.

Despite this, Dr. Sackville

Flora de GuzmanLydia AngelesImelda BoncajesNerissa BoonggalingPriscila Cabral Jane CarandangIsabelita De MesaMinerva EloriaAurelio GambaEvangeline GonzalesPatria GonzalesMinerva GuldeEmerlinda HernandezCarlos HuelmaJose IbabaoAriel JavellanaNora Kuroda

Melencio LalapAlicia LapisJuan Lazaro IVWilma LumaybayYolanda MalatagGilbert MamiitVeronica MangubatVioleta ManilaBernardo MercadoBogs PanaliganRoniella PrantillaJacqueline RagudoRenato ReañoDigna SalisiTeresita SantosAnthony TelosaLiza Yonzon

Makin it happen

Preparing for the Svalbard openinginvolved an enormous amount of hard

work by many people for many months. IRRIstaff who made the shipment possible arelisted below.

Hamilton cautioned that it isimpossible to protect against allthreats, which is why Svalbard isone—but only one—of the essentialelements of a global system for theefcient and effective conservationand use of crop diversity.

“For such an important collection we have to take all risks, no matterhow remote, into account,” he said.“For example, news of politicalunrest is common in the capitalcity Manila, and in the southernisland group Mindanao. Might thispolitical activity one day escalateto threaten IRRI? It is unlikely  but who knows? We are close to aninactive volcano, Makiling. Mightthis volcano one day erupt again?Might we suffer a force-10 earthquakeone day? The evidence suggests notin the near future, but even expert volcanologists and seismologistscannot guarantee zero risk, and they cannot make long-term predictions.”

 Among the VIPs and dignitariesat the vault’s opening, Eulogio “Tay Gipo” Sasi Jr., a 64-year-old Filipinorice farmer, represented the people without whom all the seeds in the world would be of little use. “I hopethat the knowledge that goes withthe seeds will not just be storedin ice,” said Tay Gipo, addressingthe international audience,“but further enriched by givingsupport to the work of farmers.”   J

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