The , located on the inhabited island closest to the North Pole, was awarded this Wednesday with the . Authentic Noah’s Ark of plants, it houses in a concrete building that sinks into the permafrost, the permanently frozen land of the great north, more than a million varieties of 6,500 species of plants from all climates and continents, including the Spanish olive tree. Its objective is to be insurance against hunger: fewer and fewer varieties of plants are cultivated, which makes them especially vulnerable to any disease, as happened with phylloxera, which devastated vineyards throughout Europe in the 19th century.
Located 1,400 kilometers from the North Pole, on the outskirts of the city of Longyearbyen, the management of this universal germplasm bank depends on Norway — which paid the nine million euros that the work of this futuristic building cost, in which a bad guy from a James Bond movie could live — together with Crop Trust, an international foundation supported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (), and the seed bank shared by the countries. Scandinavians, Nordic Center for Genetic Resources (NorgGen). The center was inaugurated in 2008.
All the countries in the world lead to this wild territory, where the temperature in summer barely rises above 10 degrees and which lives subject to the polar night for three months a year. Inside the vault the temperature is -18 degrees and the seeds are kept in sealed bags. However, it is not immune to climate change: because unusually high temperatures for the Arctic caused the permafrost to melt and water to enter the access tunnel.
Svalbard is, to a certain extent, every country in the world’s plan B in case their own seed banks suffer some kind of disaster. For example, it houses 1,000 olive tree samples collected by the universities of Córdoba and Granada. The boxes, of different shapes but similar sizes, show crops from Mexico, Canada, the United States, Ethiopia, Denmark or even the most secretive country on earth, North Korea. There is still plenty of room for seeds: it has a capacity for 4.5 million varieties. Each sealed package in which they are preserved contains about 500 seeds, so it could hold 2.5 billion different seeds.
The Svalbard archipelago – the bank is located on the main island, Spitsbergen – is a territory administered by Norway, in which any country in the world can establish itself, as long as it accepts the sovereignty of Oslo. In fact, there is a Russian enclave, the mining town of Barentsburg. The main rule that everyone who lives there must follow is that you cannot leave the city without carrying a rifle and showing that you know how to use it: in Svalbard there are more polar bears (about 4,000) than inhabitants (about 3,000) and these carnivores cause incidents every year. However, despite its remote location, it is connected to the rest of the planet through an international airport, which operates all year round.
When visiting the Ark of Seeds it gives the feeling of having arrived at the end of the world: in the middle of a frozen desert, with the danger of polar bears always present, the visitor comes across the entrance to a concrete cave emerging from the mountain. The vault is opened as little as possible, to preserve the temperature and the entry of diseases. It is only opened for maintenance – and very little – and a couple of times a year to receive new crops. The Vault is governed by a system identical to that of bank safe deposit boxes: only the owners of the seeds have the right to claim them and no one can access the material that is stored sealed. For now, those responsible estimate that it holds around 50% of the world’s plant diversity.
But, once inside, with a cold that becomes unbearable by the minute, you contemplate the evolution of humanity since the Neolithic revolution, the most important event in history, when plants and animals were domesticated about 10,000 years ago and human beings stopped being hunter-gatherers to become farmers and ranchers.
The lack of plant diversity is a growing concern among experts. The fewer varieties of basic foods that are grown, the more exposed they are to a disease destroying them completely in a short time, as happened with phylloxera, without which the colonization of Algeria cannot be understood, because tens of thousands of French peasants abandoned their ancestral farmlands and settled in the colony. Furthermore, the danger of climate change threatens many crops and the solution may be found hidden among the shelves of Svalbard: there are varieties of wheat that are much more resistant to heat than others, for example. And there is also the problem of patents: a few brands, like Monsanto, control the majority of the seeds planted in the world.
The British journalist Dan Saladino recently published a book titled (Col and Col, translation by Jacinto Pariente), in which he searched around the world for plant species that are on the verge of extinction and explained the enormous importance they had in fighting hunger. Crop Trust experts pointed out during a visit to the Vault that in the United States, for example, 90% of cultivable plant varieties have been lost since the 19th century. In China, 10% of those used in 1950 remain. In Mexico, 80% of the types of corn have disappeared since 1900.
Saladin told the whole problem through the most symbolic fruit in the world since the Bible: the apple. “I think apples are a good example of what we have lost,” he explained in . “It was said that in Britain it was possible to eat an apple a day for four years without trying the same variety twice. There was a lot of diversity. There were some apples that you should try with certain foods and others that could only be eaten at one time of the year because they had been stored for a certain time and tasted incredible.” However, with globalization, there was a need for apples adapted to any climate, for mass distribution, to be sold cut in plastic containers: in such a way that the market is dominated by six varieties, when some 7,500 apples are documented around the world (and they all come from the same place, the , the mountains that separate China from Central Asia).
