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How the Global Seed Vault Aims To Fight Future Famine
Lanxon writes "The Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 after engineers spent a year drilling and blasting through the sandstone, siltstone and claystone of the Norwegian Platåberget Mountain to create a system of subterranean chambers on the Advent Fjord's southern flank that could store 4.5 million seeds. It's a $9 million bet against climate change. But can it save us from the threat of worldwide famine? An article at Wired explores its current state and its future: '... it operates as a secure storage space for samples of other collections that are at risk. The samples remain at all times the property of the depositors, the only proviso being that the originals must be freely available to researchers and breeders under the terms of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. There have been deposits from every continent: 3,710 species in total, from 29 crop institutes representing 226 countries. Over the past few years the need for a secure storage facility has become ever more urgent. A typhoon in the Philippines in 2006 caused a flood that left the national crop gene bank under two meters of water.'"
Or did anyone else read the title and get a little too excited to donate.
This seems to me to be a thornier (excuse the pun) problem than nuclear waste. At least if waste leaks it only poisons a small area and hopefully doesn't wipe out entire species.
Overpopulation is the problem that's going to be causing famines in the future. This seed vault isn't going to fix the problem that there won't be enough farmland in the world to feed everybody pretty soon.
Let's start by sterilizing all of those who, whenever someone brings up overpopulation, always reply with something retarded like "WHY DON'T U KILL URSELF FIRST LOLOLOL!!!11"
Does anyone know if Monstanto's defunct, wretched, genetically modified seeds are in there as well?
if climate change doesn't happen then the value of their seed vault won't be what they are expecting and they lose.
Buying coastal real estate would be a bet againt climate change.
NATO's Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic Using "Climate Change" as a Pretext to Appropriate World Seeds' Treasure by F. William Engdahl http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10300
Oh, and without trying to sound like a l33t kid... monoculture FTL.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/19/global-seed-vault-nationa_n_616316.html
A single seed bank like this doesn't make any kind of biological sense. It is remarkably unlikely to be useful in the event of catastrophe: it's a long old road up there to Norway to replenish stocks of some ancient carrot variety from most parts of Europe.
If you actually wanted to guard biodiversity, you would encourage social networks of gardeners to replant varieties each season and share the ensuing seeds. The French organisation Kokopelli does this, but seems to suffer from legal harassment rather than incur the subsidies it would receive in any sane world.
An analogy for the slashdot crowd might be Napster (centralised) vs. BitTorrent (distributed).
You can never eat too much, only cycle too little.
I'm pretty sure that my bathtub could hold 4.5 million seeds, and for $9 million thats $2 per seed? What the hell am I missing?
1m x 1m x 1.5m = 1.5m^3 = 1500000cm^3 so my bathtub could store over a million seeds that were 1cm cubes... way larger than the average seed, right?
"His name was James Damore."
http://www.geraldscarfe.com/gallery_politics/joinatob_lg.jpg
If you give the third world food, they'll just breed more until they don't have enough to feed everyone even with the aid. Want to fight starvation effectively? Give them condoms.
I wonder why you posted that as an AC? Oh...
I am honestly wondering what kind of seeds we got from Antarctica.
There is no -1 Disagree.
I just re-read my posts... and realised that I may look like a Karma farmer, however I just watched Food Inc a few days ago and my passions are running high on a few related issues. Apologies to Slashdotters if you're getting annoyed with my multiple posts.
Ah, but if we give them condoms, we are encouraging fornication.
This seems like a textbook example of why churches are not the best agent for philanthropic missions.
Note to self: Use this as a talking point to republicans to demonstrate why tax breaks to churches are no substitute for actual social programs.
A small amount of urine just ran down my leg with (delight/drunkeness, delete as applicable)... please mod parent up.
That is our future food.. everything else just wont cut it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With more and more species becoming extinct all the time why does someone not collect genetic material from the as many remaining individual creatures from a species so that if they all die out in the future there is a chance of bringing them back.
There trying with mammoths but that is with badly preserved genetic material, imagine if you had a change to take samples of your chose from a mammoth we would be having them walking around the zoos right now.
Even from a business point of view as someone has to pay for the collection and storage, the potential for a company to hold the only remaining genetic material of an entire species would be a massive asset to a company.
Vault-Tec. Secure Your Future!
Yeah, that just happened.
OK, so cue panel 2 of the cartoon, showing two more mouths to feed, now that you fed the first one. If all these children really are dying due to lack of food, what the hell is creating even more children who will suffer the same fate, and what is going to prevent this from creating even more once you provide more food?
If you want to give the third world food, give them food instead of the cash that appears to end up in the hands of whatever warlord is currently in power. And for pete's sake, stop selling them arms, hmm?
Like most crop varieties of apples, bananas and tomatoes?
Or do they manually pollinate them? Whilst crossing fingers and hoping for the best (apple trees take a long time to grow to fruit bearing age so it's hard to validate)..
Cary Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of some two million varieties of food plants
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/27/070827fa_fact_seabrook
give a man a fish... people don't want to be given something that depends on others. They want to be productive in their own right.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Just shut the fuck up already.
When the area between A and B is filled with assholes with guns? So you go in and kill them, invade another country and try to impose your will on it? You'll note the US has done that sort of thing recently and it hasn't gone very well.
This idea that it is as simple as just giving food to starving people shows a shocking lack of ignorance of the situation of the world. It is a childlike oversimplification of the situation. I mean you are right in the basics that the world is capable of producing enough food to feed all the humans currently around. That doesn't mean it is as simple as just handing it out.
There are other even more complex questions too. As someone else noted, in destitute countries people breed quickly. So even if you did something like just airdrop in food (still an invasion by the way) you aren't really solving anything. So long as the country as a whole remains in a poor condition, people will have lots of kids. The standard of living as a whole has to be brought up, not just that people have enough to eat (that is a major part of it), but that they are more or less safe, have a place to live, have access to basic medicine, and so on. Only then do you find the birth rate falling. You have to bring prosperity, not just food, to deal with the problem. That, however, you can't just air drop, nor can you even force at the end of a gun.
Then there's simple things like the cost of shipping food across an ocean, and the sustainability of a system where people rely 100% on others for their basic needs. Not a sustainable system. They don't need food, they need the capacity to produce their own food. Related, but not the same.
If you think the solutions to the worlds problems are extremely simple, all it means is you are ignoring the realities of the world, of humans.
Ummmm....apples and tomatoes both contain seeds. My mother started tomatoes from seeds all the time.
Unless by "we" you were implying that you and I both are lacking in the necessary skills to start a tomato from seeds, which is true for me, at least compared to my mother.
Most of the food plants we grow today are hi-bred seeds. As a result, many heirloom varieties are in danger of disappearing. It is import to continually plant and harvest these seeds, every 3 or 4 years or so, to keep them potent. Individual gardeners can help immensely. It is important that heirloom varieties not be grown near to other varieties or hi-breds of the same species in order to avoid contaminating the genome by cross-pollination. Yes, your back yard garden is a better place to grow an heirloom carrot than a university research station, because you have natural isolation that is immensely expensive for a university to achieve.
It is important to preserve these genomes so that various properties, for instance resistance to particular diseases, is preserved in the species' genome.
That's no talking point at all! Many Republicans would agree that condoms encourage fornication, which, again, most of them would be against. Also, as the GP said, giving them food encourages them to breed, thus fulfilling God's first command after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, namely "be fruitful and multiply". That and they'd probably say social programs are "communist", too, so even if they're demonstrably better than churches they're automatically evil anyway.
But then again I'm a pessimist...
ffs you retard, apples grow from seeds as well.
financial interests.
there is enough food on earth for everyone.
Google: Greg Palast hunger
Has anybody else here read the newly-released-in-SFBC title "Windup Girl"? Paulo Bacigalupi has written a cautionary tale of where GM crops, IP and climate change collide with gene hacking and seed banks in Thiland.
I haven't read anything quite so disturbing since "Blood Music".
And yet they built it on an ISLAND!!! Facing the arctic ocean! What gives??? I thought they were worried about flooding! GCC! Why didn't they put it in Idaho, or Montana! Again, what gives???
The No. 1 (1959, China) and 3 1932, (USSR) famine by fatalities in history are caused by politics. Can this vault save us from those?
And, don't give them access to medical care. The problem of overpopulation only became one the moment they had access to modern medical care, since if they don't, child mortality will take care of the problem.
Also, don't give them medicaments against HIV - the disease would probably long since have died out in Africa as all the carriers died away.
This is in fact quite correct.
There's a country in Africa, which name I just forgot, which was doing quite OK by their own. They had stable food market there and so on. Enter the charity organizations...
Charity organizations brought free food to the country because it was said that people there are starving. Well, they weren't, but hey! it's Africa and everyone MUST be starving there because it's Africa. Now what happens to economy, when free goods are introduced to the market? It collapses! Production drops to zero. No-one did any farming after that because food prices were zero. Why waste time and resources on farming when you can't get any income from it?
No imagine what happens when that free food is taken away from the market and production is near zero? Starvation. It takes time to put your fields back in order and start growing things. Then it takes time to things to grow. After that you need to harvest and take it to the market place.
So charity organization destroyed a good stable economy just that they could get publicity points in the eyes of the rest of the world. They would have probably done much better job by just staying at home.
You don't know what you don't know.
...with any kind of accuracy. Apples can't self pollinate, which means you'll never get the same variety of apple out of its seeds. Sure, you'll get an apple, but not the same apple you were expecting.
Google for more info:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=growing+apples+from+seed
As far as tomatoes go I was refering to certain popular crop tomatoes which, as I understand it, do not produce viable seeds.
I understand that a lot of the varieties grown commercially have similar problems. They've either been designed to be sterile, or they involve splicing one plant onto another (see: apple tree) or something similar...
Ah, but if we give them condoms, we are encouraging fornication.
This seems like a textbook example of why churches are not the best agent for philanthropic missions.
Note to self: Use this as a talking point to republicans to demonstrate why tax breaks to churches are no substitute for actual social programs.
Church's should be non profit groups. They shouldn't get a tax break. It would stop on some of these seriously fake, oh wait, nm, they all are seriously fake.
Point stands. Tax breaks for religons is very stupid. And bias.
Be seeing you...
It's easier to say this than to do this, but I would argue that we need at least three of those locations. Unfortunately, only the near-Arctic is suitable, the southern hemisphere has no locations that are the right temperature.
Ah, but if we give them condoms, we are encouraging fornication.
Sex is the leading cause of pregnancy and AIDS transmission. The less sex you have the smaller the odds are that pregnancy or infection will occur.
If you give out condoms (which have a 10% failure rate in "typical" use), you're giving people the impression that they'll be safe(r) and they'll act accordingly. It's called risk compensation:
In ethology, risk compensation is an effect whereby individual people may tend to adjust their behaviour in response to perceived changes in risk. It is seen as self-evident that individuals will tend to behave in a more cautious manner if their perception of risk or danger increases. Another way of stating this is that individuals will behave less cautiously in situations where they feel "safer" or more protected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
"Use this as a talking point to republicans to demonstrate why tax breaks to churches are no substitute for actual social programs."
Then be prepared to lose that argument. Getting pretty typical of anti-Republicans these days to present a false argument then get beaten to a pulp with it. I'd thought when you'd win the anti-Republican elections, you'd act, well, not like "us."
There are Republicans like myself who believe in separation of Church and State, and that giving a tax break to a church, church organization, that is not available to any regular non-church organization is a violation of the Constitution. If the church group is meets some other requirements for a general organization and that law is not written exclusively as a bypass (such as a law written so that only church groups would meet the criteria), then it's not favoring church groups as you want to imply.
So your talking point, well, ain't one. Proud to be a redneck. Better than a blue blood.
Seeds? Really? Seeds? Germination rates on most plant genomes drops near zero over time, because the issues involved in seed storage are not well understood. That makes this idea little more than a decent science experiment.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
A famine is the result of drastic environmental change that can be the result of or cause a taxation on the land to the point where it cannot sustain crops capable of feeding a large scale metropolis. the point is that in order to feed people you need to be able to grow enough food. seeds do not feed people, the produce from crops which take time is what feeds people. If the world wants to be able to protect against famine then they need to take preventive steps to do so. they could develop better land conservation practices, not isolationism. Develop more efficient water control and containment ensuring that during times of drought crops are getting only exactly the required amount needed to produce a good yield and no more. this story is in fact out of context anyway. the original purpose of this project was to preserve the genome in case of any number of disasters that would result in the failure to produce food because the seeds needed to do so are no longer available. radiation has been known to sterilize seeds usually in less hardy plants.
I personally don't believe the magnetism theories but I certainly haven't written them off completely. I don't discount people because they may believe in theories/ideas that are contrary to my own. I try my best to maintain an open mind on most things and have even allowed weird new-age stuff to be performed on me with on two occasions startling and somewhat spooky results(not that I have become a new age convert). /. over the last few years. Once upon a time this site was filled with people prepared to learn and have their beliefs challenged. Now it is full of straw man/ad hominen BS that gets modded up instead of to the garbage where it belongs. My above post has actually earnt me a foe. My first foe I am so proud.
What I find of most concern is the changes I have noticed in
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I remember reading about a flap not too long ago, in which the founders of Seed Savers Exchange (a large heirloom seed organization; mentioned a few times in the threads above) wound up in a bitter and very public dispute concerning transfer of member-supplied seed to Svalbard. Unfortunately, between the increasingly over-the-top rants, deletion of posts on the topic and PR spin control as the thing heated up, I could never get a clear picture of just what it was factually about. The complaint as I understand it was (in this case) extensive collections of member-donated seed from SSE's private collections (some 25k varieties - not all of which are released to the general public) were supplied under a "safety deposit box" style agreement, but later transferred to Svalbard without permission. More generally, it is asserted that supplying seed of any species/cultivar/etc. to Svalbard places that genetic material under what's known as the FAO Treaty, allowing legally free-and-clear access to seed of that variety by interested parties, including GMO companies. The side opposing the SSE/Svalbard deal asserts that while the stored seed itself remains the property of the donor, the donor "cannot refuse" requests for genetically-equivalent seed from interested parties under the terms of treaty.
To make a more Slashdot-friendly analogy (sorry, no cars), it sounds like the concern is that placing any seed there puts it automatically under a BSD-style license, which goes against the intentions of many heirloom growers/donors whose stance against GMO (terminator genes, seeds with IP protection) may be considered more GPL-like.
http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/2010/10/seed-savers-exchange-3/
Googling various combinations of the terms Svalbard, Seed Savers Exchange, FAO, Kent Whealy and Cary Fowler turns up various collections of rumors, damage control and tinfoil hat rants (including widespread claims that Monsanto is a primary investor to Svalbard...a claim Monsanto denies.)... does anyone know the full / factual story on this?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.