[Pil-pc-oceania] Fwd: [GRAIN] Faults in the seed vault at Svalbard, Norway
Robyn Williamson
ecogarden at yahoo.com.au
Fri Feb 29 17:31:36 EST 2008
In 2002, Jude & Michel Fanton of the Seed Savers Network in Byron Bay
NSW http://www.seedsavers.net established over 60 local seed networks
all over Australia in anticipation of catastrophic events such as
those described in the following article. It was decided at the time
that the only way to safeguard what remains of our agricultural
biodiversity was to have it growing in a million backyards all over
the country, in addition to ex situ storage in 60 or more local seed
banks, where locally grown, organic, heritage or other open-
pollinated seeds are available for sharing within local communities
of seedsavers. Kind of like insurance except you get value for no
money.
The article below, forwarded from GRAIN http://www.grain.org , is a
must-read so that you can make an informed decision about whether you
believe what they're saying on the radio and TV news about Svalbard
of late. On Late Night Live a couple of weeks ago, Phillip Adams
interviewed someone (sorry, forgot the name) who was going great guns
until he got to the bit about feeding the starving masses with
genetically modified crops and I had to switch off. Before the
interview however, Phillip gave Jude & Michel a fantastic plug, did
you hear it Jude?
Jude Fanton will be a keynote speaker at APC9 talking about
Permaculture and The Seed Savers Network, don't miss it!
Regards
Robyn W
CONTACT DETAILS:
Robyn Williamson
APC9 Secretariat
info at apc9.org.au
Ph/Fx: (02) 9629 3560
Mobile: 0409 151 435
http://apc9.org.au
Begin forwarded message:
> From: info at grain.org
> Date: 26 February 2008 4:04:10 PM
> To: ecogarden at yahoo.com.au
> Subject: [New from GRAIN] Svalbard seed vault: not everyone is
> celebrating
>
>
> New from GRAIN
> February 2007
> http://www.grain.org/nfg/?id=557
> http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=36
>
>
> FAULTS IN THE VAULT: NOT EVERYONE IS CELEBRATING SVALBARD
>
> After months of extraordinary publicity, and with the apparently
> unanimous support of the international scientific community, the
> "Global Seed Vault" was officially opened today on an island in
> Svalbard, Norway. Nestled inside a mountain, the Vault is basically
> a giant icebox able to hold 4.5 million seed samples in cold
> storage for humanity's future needs. The idea is that if some major
> disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout from a nuclear
> war, countries could turn to the Vault to pull out seeds to restart
> food production. However, this "ultimate safety net" for the
> biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly 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.
>
> FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS
>
> Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and one of
> the main proponents of the Vault, says that the initiative "will
> rescue the most globally important developing-country collections
> of the world's 21 most important food crops." While it's true that
> crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected, as irreplaceable
> diversity is being lost at an alarming scale, relying solely on
> burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has
> 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop
> diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many
> have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the
> seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics
> or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs.
> This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in
> genebanks of developing countries. So the issue is not about being
> for or against genebanks, it is about the sole reliance on one
> conservation strategy that, in itself, has a lot of inherent problems.
>
> The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage,
> that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally
> unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the
> farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected
> and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The
> logic is that as people's traditional varieties get replaced by
> newer ones from research labs -- seeds that are supposed to provide
> higher yields to feed a growing population -- the old ones have to
> be put away as "raw material" for future plant breeding. This
> system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing,
> plant breeders. To access the seeds, you have to be integrated into
> a whole institutional framework that most farmers on the planet
> simply don't even know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ
> strategy caters to the needs of scientists, not farmers
>
> In addition, 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.
> In the case of most so-called public genebanks, the seeds are said
> to become part of "the public domain" if not "national
> sovereignty" (which increasingly translates to state ownership).
> The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
> (CGIAR), which runs about 15 global genebanks for the world's most
> widely used staple food crops, has even set up a legal arrangement
> of "trusteeship" that it exercises over the treasure chest of
> farmers' seeds that it holds "on behalf of" the international
> community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the
> farmers whom they took the seeds from in the first place if this
> was okay and they left farmers totally out of the trusteeship
> equation.
>
> The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty
> architecture and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these
> problems. Because it is a "doomsday" backup collection, it raises
> the stakes to new extremes. Nobody really knows for sure if the
> Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive and its security
> is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault, Svalbard
> was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway's history,
> even though the facility's feasibility study assured that "there is
> no volcanic or significant seismic activity" in the area. But more
> troubling than any technical matter is the issue of access, the
> keys to which are held by few hands.
>
> ACCESS AND BENEFIT ILLS
>
> The Vault is not immune from the terrible controversies over access
> to and benefits from the world's precious agricultural
> biodiversity. The Norwegian government is ultimately responsible
> for the Vault and is currently regarded as fair and trustworthy,
> but there is no guarantee that the country's policies won't change.
> This is acknowledged by the Norwegian government itself, which has
> provided agreements to be signed with depositors that last only ten
> years and that include clauses allowing them to be terminated if
> policies change. Probably more important, the Norwegian government
> will not be making decisions autonomously. Decisions will be shared
> with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a private entity with strong
> private and corporate funding.
>
> There are already some access issues with the Vault. For all
> practical purposes, seeds cannot be stored in the Vault unless they
> come from genebanks that have successfully duplicated their samples
> in another bank. More than this, depositors are not allowed to put
> in seeds that are already stored in the Vault. The Standard
> Depositor Agreement states that the "Depositor shall deposit only
> samples of plant genetic resources that are, to the best of the
> Depositor's knowledge, ... samples of plant genetic resources that
> have not yet been deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault" and
> that "the Depositor recognizes the right of the Royal Norwegian
> Ministry of Agriculture and Food to refuse to accept samples for
> deposit or to terminate the deposit of samples already deposited if
> the samples constitute duplicates of materials already held in
> deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault".
>
> As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at
> Svalbard, or give permission for someone else to. With parcels of
> CGIAR seeds already arriving in Norway, this means that the CGIAR
> Centres will be the depositors for most of the seeds held in the
> Vault, giving them almost exclusive control over access. Indeed,
> as the Seed Vault feasibility study indicates, it was "assumed that
> the [Vault] would begin operations with a nucleus consisting of the
> CGIAR materials and those of certain key national genebanks and
> that this (sic) 'founding collections' would discourage subsequent
> unnecessary duplication of materials within the Svalbard facility."
> Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have registered with the
> Vault so far, only three are national seed banks from developing
> countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just
> anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR's private stash.
>
> In practical terms this means that many developing countries that
> want to duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able
> to do so directly. It would be seen as a duplicate of what the
> CGIAR has already deposited. They will not, therefore, have direct
> access to seeds in the Vault that may have been collected from
> their country. This might not seem to pose many concerns right now
> because governments have different backup sources for seeds but the
> context would be vastly different under any doomsday scenario where
> decisions would have to be taken over a critical, unique resource
> which suddenly only remains in Svalbard. For farmers there is
> pretty much no possibility for direct access to seeds in the Vault.
>
> But doomsday aside, it is important to ask who really benefits from
> the ex situ system that the Vault contributes to. As the few
> transnational seed corporations that control over half the world's
> US$30 billion annual commercial seed market are increasingly buying
> up public plant breeding programmes and governments are pulling out
> of plant breeding, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the very same
> corporations that are at the roots of crop diversity destruction.
>
> STOP DESTROYING DIVERSITY INSTEAD!
>
> If governments were truly interested in conserving biodiversity for
> food and agriculture, they would do two things. First, they would,
> as a central priority, focus their efforts on supporting diversity
> in their countries' farms and markets rather than only betting on
> big centralised genebanks. This means leaving seeds in the hand of
> local farmers, with their active and innovative farming practices,
> respecting and promoting the rights of communities to conserve,
> produce, breed, exchange and sell seeds. But this won't happen
> until governments turn agricultural policy and regulations upside
> down and stop pushing for industrialisation and feeding corporate-
> controlled global markets at the expense of letting farmers freely
> feed their own communities and countries. This means making food
> sovereignty the foundation of farm policy instead of continuously
> pushing agriculture further down the destructive path of corporate-
> led global market integration.
>
> Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some
> hypothetic emergency. The real urgency, however, is to let
> diversity live -- in farms, in the hand of farmers, and across
> people-controlled and community-oriented markets -- today.
>
> =================================================
>
> GOING FURTHER:
>
> Aasa Christine Stoltz, "Norway's biggest quake hits Svalbard
> archipelago," Reuters, 21 February 2008.
> http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2173668320080221
>
> Norwegian government and the Svalbard vault:
> http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/
>
> Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Svalbard vault: http://
> www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=216
>
> International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
> Agriculture
> http://www.planttreaty.org/
>
> GRAIN, "The FAO seed treaty: from farmers' rights to breeders'
> privileges," Seedling, October 2005.
> http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=411
>
> Center for International Environment and Development Studies et al,
> "Study to assess the feasibility of establishing a Svalbard Arctic
> seed depository for the international community", prepared for the
> Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture and
> Food, 14 September 2004.
> http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-
> vault/publications.html?id=463313
>
> Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Standard Depositor Agreement. http://
> www.nordgen.org/sgsv/index.php?page=depositor_guidelines
>
> =================================================
>
> GRAIN, Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard,
> "Against the grain", February 2007, http://www.grain.org/articles/?
> id=36. Also available in PDF format: http://www.grain.org/articles/?
> id=36&pdf
>
> Disponible en Español - http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=37
>
> Bientôt disponible en français - http://www.grain.org/fr/
>
>
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> 26 February 2008
> ===========================================================
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