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By IAN MacDOUGALL, Associated Press Writer Ian Macdougall, Associated Press
Writer Wed Mar 10, 7:01 pm ET
OSLO, Norway Two years after receiving its first deposits, a "doomsday" seed
vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it
the world's most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault's operators
announced Thursday.
Cary Fowler who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is
620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole, said the facility now houses
at least one-third of the world's crop seeds.
"In my lifetime, I don't think we'll go over 1.5 million. I'd be rather
surprised if we go over a million," Fowler told The Associated Press. "At that
point, we'd have all the diversity in the world ... and the most secure
samples."
Located in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
is a safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around
the globe. It was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world's other 1,400
seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.
War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the
Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. The Svalbard bank is
designed to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.
Despite the rapid progress, Fowler said the bank still has significant holes in
its collection.
"There are a few unique collections that we don't have up there yet Ethiopia
and some of the Indian materials and some of the Chinese materials," he said.
The most recent additions include a mold-resistant bean from Colombia and a
collection of nearly every agricultural soybean species developed in the U.S.
in the last century.