Why a Russian seed bank is vital to agriculture

2010 is the Year of Biodiversity. It is therefore particularly ironic that in 2010, it took a worldwide Twitter campaign to spark an inquiry into the closure of the Pavlovsk Research Station in Russia. Pavlovsk is the world’s oldest seed bank, and the site where 12 scientists chose to starve to death rather than eat their precious specimens during a 900-day siege in World War II.

According to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, one crop variety is lost every day – and only around 150 are cultivated on a significant scale worldwide. Both seed banks and wild populations are crucial resources to maintain genetic variety and traits that could be crucial to maintaining robust and productive harvests. Examples from history support this: grassy stunt virus decimated the Indian rice crop in the 1970s, and genetic resistance was found in just one of 6200 species. Again in the 1970s, when corn blight destroyed 15% of the US maize crop, resistance was found in the last remaining wildtype in an endangered Mexican habitat.

The loss of biodiversity therefore represents not only a significant business risk to the agricultural industry but a genuine threat to future food security – how will we create new varieties for our changing climate if we have only a handful of types to work with?  Whilst stopping the loss of biodiversity in the wild is the ideal option, seed banks represent an important resource or ‘back-up plan’. Pavlovsk contains specimens of over 5,000 varieties of seeds and berries from a multitude of countries, and more than 90% of them cannot be found in any other research collection.

But there are encouraging signs that the wider community is waking up to the importance of crop diversity. The Heritage Seed Library is currently aware of ~50 UK seed groups across the rural and urban locations in the UK, where gardeners are getting together to swap and share seeds. Little-known local varieties could even prove useful with experts encouraging farmers to diversify in order to defend themselves against environmental change. And on a bigger scale, the Norwegian Government opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2008 that currently protects over half a million seed samples from around the world.

The Pavlovsk Twitter campaign shows that the public are talking about and influencing the debate on how we are going to be able to feed ourselves in the future. What does crop diversity mean for farmers in the UK? Are you growing just one variety of crop? What do you think we should be doing about it?

Kate O’Hagan is the Administrator for Farming Futures. You can contact her on k.ohagan@forumforthefuture.org  

This is the first blog in a series of three exploring the importance of biodiversity to the agricultural industry Watch this space over the next few weeks to read them.

• Sign the Global Crop Diversity Trust's petition to tell President Medvedev to stop the closure of Pavlovsk.
• For more information about promoting biodiversity on your farm visit the Campaign for the Farmed Environment.
• Get agriculture accounted in Biodiversity 100, a new international campaign launched  to promote action in the G20 countries. They are asking for everyone to submit towards a list of 100 specific targets for authorities to sign up to prior to the international biodiversity summit in Japan in October.
• The European Environment Agency has produced ’10 messages for 2010’. Read Message 7 ‘Agricultural Ecosystems’.