Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Yeah all those damn GM crops producing higher yeild so millions more can feed their families.
Unnatural I tell you!
the "bet against climate change" seemed pretty straightforward to me that it was a bet against the success of climate change
maybe it's just me, but I got what they were saying.
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 not against GM, I'm against companies OWNING genes. It's the old story of proprietary vs open source... do you really want the food sources of humanities future controlled by corporations with only a profit motive and no humanitarian concerns?
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
Gah, humanity's*. It's late here, 4am does not make for good grammar. So sayeth the Yoda. Actually, "4am does not good grammar make", so sayeth the Yoda.
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.
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.
Does anyone know if Monstanto's defunct, wretched, genetically modified seeds are in there as well?
Highly doubtful. From the summary, "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."
Considering that the only organization more vile, despicable, and a greater danger to humanity than the Mafiaa (including their bought and paid for lackeys in the governments) is Monsanto, I doubt they would be able to cooperate with such an agreement.
Besides, seeds that can only be used once since they have death codes inside them don't belong in that seed vault by definition.
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.
Monsanto are one of the largest investors of this elaborate project, and anyone who has studied Monsanto knows that Monsanto is NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
They take absolutely every chance they get to strengthen their death-grip on international agriculture, if we give them an inch they will take a mile. This is about world domination of agriculture.
They always sell their modified crap as being greatly beneficial and liberating to the poor farmers, when in reality they are shackling third world countires to rely on first-world corporations to produce food. Total enslavement.
"When you control the oil, you control the county. When you control the food, you control the population" - Henry Kissenger
Please people, open your mind and consider the history of Monsanto and the other groups involved in this project - we cannot afford to allow things like this to happen. Monsanto's seed is designed to produce only a single yield, and is modified to withstand the poisonous pesticides they produce; they have a very elaborate marketing machine working to deceive poor farmers across the globe to buy into this rip-off, this rabbit whole goes quite deep and when you get to the bottom of it, it's a total travesty that words can scarcely describe. If ever there was an organization worthy of the moniker "Evil Corporation" it would be Monsanto.
I implore you all to take the time to watch the documentary The World According to Monsanto and follow the claims up with your own research - only when you have verified the length and breadth of the crimes against humanity commited by this corporation will you understand the gravity of what is transpiring. These people are presenting enslavement as a solution, seeking to rule us with an iron fist in a velvet glove - we must be vigilant to avoid deception.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Natural News? Seriously? Hint: a site that promotes homeopathy, reiki, and magic silver as cancer cures and says the vaccines cause autism isn't a good source of information. Great example of crank magnetism though.
Crap like this is what pisses me off. No, Monsanto is not your friend, but then you have clueless people railing against them with no idea as to what is actually going on, and that just makes the whole issue that much harder. I won't listen to the medical opinions of a doctor who uses the terms brain and heart interchangeably, and I won't listen to agricultural opinions of people who use pesticide and herbicide interchangeably. And you know so many are only against Monsanto because they do genetic engineering, and, at this point in time, anti-GMO is just another form of baseless pseudoscientific crank denialism woowoo. "I saw Splice once, so I know more about genetic engineering than geneticists!" No, you don't, you just can't be effed to crack a book before protesting. They're like the anti-vaxxers and alt-med quacks who rant about companies like Pfizer and Merck, not because of the bad things those companies actually do, but because said cranks don't understand the science behind pharmaceuticals/vaccines. Then people like me, who do understand the science behind GMOs, the science behind what Monsanto does, are left in the awkward position of defending Monsanto for the sake of accuracy.
By all means, keep an eye on them, they are not to be trusted, hell, it looks like they may have lied about the yield of there latest generation of soybean, but keep it in the real, don't try to pass off anti-Monsanto sentiment as actual science, and stay away from tinfoil land. When the two major points in an agreement are backed by moneyed interests and and the ignorant yet vocal, it makes it really hard to find the truth.
Oh, crap, you're right, I guess I really wasn't paying attention. I forgot the dash in the term woo-woo. My bad. I hope that clears things up.