Banking Against Doomsday; Agricultural Biodiversity  

Oleh:

[s.n]

Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine
Dalam koleksi: The Economist (http://search.proquest.com/) vol. 402 no. 8775 (Mar. 2012), page 60-61.
Topik: Agriculture; Seeds; Biological Diversity; Gene Banks; Manycountries; Natural Resources

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE29.70 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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Opened in 2008, the Svalbard vault is a backup for the world's 1,750 seed banks, storehouses of agricultural biodiversity. To illustrate the need for it, the Philippines' national seed bank was destroyed by fire in January, six years after it was damaged by flooding. Those of Afghanistan and Iraq were destroyed in recent wars. Should the conflict in Syria reach that country's richest store, in Aleppo, the damage would now be less. Some 110,000 Syrian seed samples are now in the Svalbard vault, out of around 750,000 samples in all. The Svalbard vault is protected by two airlocks, at the end of a tunnel sunk 160 metres into the permafrost of Norway's Arctic archipelago, outside the village of Longyearbyen, one of the world's most northerly habitations. It is maintained at a constant temperature of -18C. This is serious disaster preparedness: if its electricity were cut, Mr Fowler reckons the vault would take two centuries to warm to freezing point. He also enthusiastically points to its concave tunnel-head, designed to deflect the force of a missile strike. Such precautions have spawned the facility's nickname: the Doomsday Vault. Mr Fowler, who manages it on behalf of Norway's government, an association of Nordic gene banks and an international body, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, reckons the vault contains samples of around two-thirds of the world's stored crop biodiversity.

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