Brazil beans and Japan barley come to Svalbard

Over 20,000 crops originating from over 100 countries arrived in Svalbard on Wednesday to be put into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) in time for the its sixth anniversary.

Published: 26 February 2014 16:13 CET

Brazil beans and Japan barley come to Svalbard

The seeds are delivered the the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Wednesday. Photo: Global Crop Diversity Trust

The samples included a university collection of barley from earthquake-rattled Japan; an untamed assortment of wild relatives of rice, maize and wheat; exotic red okra from Tennessee; and, from Brazil, a humble bean that launched a national cuisine.

The new delivery brings the total number of samples stored deep beneath the rock to 820,619, giving agricultural systems worldwide insurance against natural or manmade disasters.

The crops arrived on the tenth anniversary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the seed vault. along with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resources Centre.

“We are particularly excited to be welcoming our first seed deposits from Japan, which has been very active globally in the preservation of a wide array of crop species,” Marie Haga, the Crop Trust’s executive director, said in a statement. “Each and every single deposit into the vault provides an option for the future."

The seed vault is a backup, housing duplicates of the living crop diversity collections kept in “genebanks” around the world.

Contributors to the seed bank in this delivery included: the Barley Germplasm Center of Okayama University in Japan; the CGIAR’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known by its Spanish-language acronym CIMMYT); the International Potato Center (known by its Spanish acronym CIP); the Australian Grains Genebank and Australian Tropical Crops Collection; the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI); the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (known as Embrapa); and the Seed Savers Exchange of the United States.

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The archipelago is located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, in an Arctic region that has become a geopolitical and economic hotspot as the ice melts and relations grow ever frostier between Russia and the West.

For €300 million ($326 million), interested parties can acquire the remote Sore Fagerfjord property in southwestern Svalbard.

Measuring 60 square kilometres (23 square miles) — about the size of Manhattan — the property is home to mountains, plains, a glacier and about five kilometres of coastline, but no infrastructure.

“It’s the last private land in Svalbard, and, to our knowledge, the last private land in the world’s High Arctic,” said lawyer Per Kyllingstad, who represents the sellers.

“The Chinese are naturally potential buyers since they’ve been showing a real interest in the Arctic and Svalbard for a long time,” he told AFP, adding that he had received “concrete signs of interest” from the country.

Special treaty

Since China’s 2018 white paper on the Arctic — a sign of its interest in the region — the country has defined itself a “near-Arctic state” and plans to play a growing role in the region.

Svalbard is governed by a 1920 international treaty that leaves ample room for foreign interests.

It recognises Norway’s sovereignty over Svalbard, but citizens of all signatories — including China — are equally entitled to exploit the region’s natural resources.

Russia, for example, has maintained a coal mining community on Svalbard, via the state-run company Trust Arktikugol, for decades.

But times have changed.

Keen to protect its sovereignty, Norway would not look kindly on the Sore Fagerfjord property falling into foreign hands.

Especially hands in China, which Norway’s intelligence services say poses the biggest security risk to the Scandinavian country after Russia.

Norway’s Attorney General has therefore ordered the owners — a company controlled by a Russian-born Norwegian, according to local media — to call off the planned sale.

“The land can’t be sold without the Norwegian authorities’ approval,” Trade and Industry Minister Cecilie Myrseth told AFP.

“Nor is it possible to hold negotiations about the property,” she added.

That argument is based on clauses of an old loan granted by the state in 1919. Kyllingstad insists the clauses’ statute of limitations has expired.