Financial Crisis May Affect World’s Seed Bank
The keeper’s of the world’s most diverse seed bank are worried that the global financial crisis could cut its government and corporate funding and cause the seed gathering to wither at the end of next year, well short of its goal.
Paul Smith, director of the Millennium Seed Bank Project, said the ultramodern facility is currently the world’s biodiversity hot spot.
“That’s important for mankind. But if the funding situation doesn’t improve, we’ll have to stop collecting,” said Smith, standing outside two room-size vaults filled with precious seeds which are kept at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit to slow their metabolism.
However, the tightening of philanthropic budgets in recent months is affecting the seed bank’s future. "We have not raised the kind of money we had hoped to at this point," Smith said.
There are more than 1,000 seed banks – including a newly opened, unmanned "doomsday" facility in the Arctic wastes of Norway that will ultimately house more than 1 billion crop seeds. But the one at Wakehurst Place, about 30 miles south of London, says it’s the only global facility of its kind, unique for its focus on wild species, not just crops.
By 2020, it aims to store a quarter of the world’s species and could eventually house half of them. It currently has 25,000 species and 1.5 billion seeds.
The scientists at the seed bank gauge the total number of plant species at 300,000, which represents a middle figure in the widely varying, constantly changing, global estimate.
Millennium Bank seeds are being used in Australia to figure out what plants can grow in salty reclaimed land, and in Pakistan and Egypt to find plants that can withstand drought and slow desert encroachment.
The Millennium Seed Bank spends about $3,000 per species to ship in the seeds, meticulously clean them, X-ray them for insect damage and freeze them for possible future use as medicine, a commercial product, or a reviver of a plant that has gone extinct.
But the bank has more than 120 different partners in some 50 countries where seeds are collected and stored. In many cases, seeds are kept both in their native countries and here as a backup.
The project started in 2000 with 72 million pounds and funding from Britain’s national lottery and governmental, corporate and individual sponsors.
The seed bank needs to raise about 10 million pounds ($15 million) a year for the next decade, Smith said.
Scientists see the futuristic facility as an insurance policy against nature and human folly. They say the Millennium effort is invaluable as climate change accelerates.
David Astley, head of the Genetics Resources Unit at the University of Warwick in England, who corroborated the Millennium Projects claim to be the world’s most diverse seed bank, called the potential value of the of the project “almost unfathomable”.
Astley said if you look at the way the world is going, it’s inevitable that genetic material will be lost.
"The big fear is that, if global warming comes sooner rather than later, it may be too late to conserve the material."
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