Madrid
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Keep
In the Arctic Circle, underground and inside a bunker at -18ºC that is proof against earthquakes and nuclear attacks, is one of the lifesavers of humanity: the World Seed Bank of Svalbard. This vegetal Noah’s Ark created in 2008 keeps over a million crop varieties from almost every country in the world. From now on, this unique scientific infrastructure will also guard Spanish seeds to protect them from any local or global cataclysm, be it war or climate change.
The first 1,080 varieties to be sent are already prepared in the freezers of the Plant Genetic Resources Center of the INIA-CSIC (National Institute of Agricultural Research and Technology and
Alimentaria, integrated in the Higher Center for Scientific Research), in charge of preserving all this history of the native field. The team of researchers from the institution led by Luis Guasch has chosen, for the time being, a small sample of the more than 44,000 different plants housed in the national collection: 300 winter cereals (114 of them wheat), 510 legumes (189 beans) and 200 vegetables (81 tomatoes and 108 corn).
“But the intention is to send everything,” says this agricultural engineer. The Spanish conservation system has 37 installations distributed throughout the country, and a backup copy is kept in the corresponding center and another in the national headquarters. “Until now it was considered that this was enough. But during the Syrian war they bombed the national seed bank, which was in Aleppo, and were able to recover many of their species thanks to the Svalbard depot, so we saw that it didn’t hurt to have an extra copy outside. In addition, we were one of the few countries that did not have plants there and we wanted to show that we were involved with the project and the preservation of our biodiversity.
The seeds will be transported frozen at -20ºC and are scheduled to be shipped the first week of June. “Before sending them, we have multiplied them so that they arrive in the best possible condition. In Svalbard they are kept in a black box that does not open, but with our own copies we see if they are still viable and germinate well, so if something happens or they lose a high percentage of viability we can plant them again, multiply them and send them back”, he reflects. this biotechnology expert, who adds that not all crops can be maintained like this. «There are plants, such as the acorn, that are not preserved in these low temperature conditions and moisture to minimize your metabolism. Many tropical species and those that reproduce by means of bulbs cannot be kept like this either. And there are others that must be cultivated periodically, such as garlic and saffron. The vine and the olive tree, for example, are also preserved in the field».
In Spain, ‘vegetable archives’ began to be created in the 19th century, but it was not until 1981 that they gave shape to the current seed bank system, says Guasch. The concern to protect agricultural biodiversity grew worldwide throughout the seventies, when they saw that many farmers were abandoning traditional crops in favor of more commercial varieties. Although there are already extremely important national warehouses such as Fort Collins in the United States or the Vavílov Institute in Russia – which even survived the siege of Leningrad thanks to the tenacity of twelve scientists who ended up starving to save their plants – Svalbard is a neutral refuge for all mankind.
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