Global Seed Vault part 2: the critics

See here for part one: here
Not everyone is completely enamored with 'the Vault'. Dermot McKinney, project manager of the Irish Seed Savers: � its a very nice idea, but the only way to save the planet from disaster is to have seeds in people's hands, not in a vault north of Norway.�

Others working in third world development have also expressed similar concerns about about the emphasis on ex situ rather than in situ seed storage.

According to the Non Governmental Organisation Grain, there are, as they put it, faults with the Vault: [this is] �just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant � indeed, only � approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.�

One practical concern expressed is the static nature of the vault. According to Dermot McKinney �storing seeds far into the future may be impractical. The seeds would be imprinted with the traits of now. They may not be viable�

So 'the Vault' is like a moment in time, a library where all the books are dated no later than 2009:

�Things change but these seeds won't. The climate will have changed. We use a 10 year rotation here at the Irish Seed Savers to deal with this in the real world�.

From a developing world perspective, the Vault can actually be seen as a moment of final theft:
�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�, Grain claim.
As depositors are not allowed to put in seeds that are already stored in the Vault, first group in essentially claims ownership. So while the origin and subsequent generations of development of many food plant seeds occurred what is now modern day Iraq and Syria, farmers from these regions still growing food plants are disenfranchised from access to the Vault.

In a doomsday type situation, which is the function of the Vault, a minority of rich western nations and private corporations would thus own the world's seeds.

"This system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders,�� said Shalini Bhutani, GRAIN�s Asia Programme Officer, who is based in New Delhi.

Norway was chosen for its stability, and without doubt it is one of the world's most stable and indeed egalitarian nations. It also shows a strong commitment to environmental sustainability, and is supposed to be unlikely to suffer from natural disasters.

Eerily enough, Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway's history, measuring 6.5 on the Reciter scale in February 2008.

For their part, having invested so much of their own resources in the Vault, the Norwegian government are slightly bemused by the criticisms:

According to Jan Borring of the Department for International Cooperation in the Norwegian Ministry of Environment, a key issue is the fact that �storage space is not unlimited� and �most of this material will be generally available anyway� because of international trading rules and arrangements.

Crucially, the Seed Vault �is a duplicate facility, an extra layer of security, not a working seed bank as such, and even less a community seed bank that distributes seed directly to farmers or others� according to Borring.

Forward again to 2060. Would a raggle taggle band of scavengers get access to the seeds if they really needed them? How will power and politics play out in such a doomsday scenario? History and present realities can teach us, if we choose to listen to the lessons.