It also recognized Svalbard as the most suitable place for a global seed vault. The feasibility study concluded that it would be possible to establish an ultimate “fail-safe” protection for the world’s most valuable natural resources, that it could be efficient, sustainable and affordable, and also politically and legally acceptable. The Treaty became the guidance for one of the important conditions for depositing seeds in the Seed Vault, namely that any depositor agrees to make available – from its own stocks – samples of the deposited seed resources for research, plant breeding and educational purposes. The seed samples shipped to Svalbard would still be the property of the country or the gene banks that sent the seeds. When The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) entered into force in 2004, the legal framework for having one international security facility was already in place. Global Treaty endorses to Seed Vault concept It also determined that the Nordic seed collection’s storage in a coal mine periodically facing a high level of hydrocarbon gases was not sufficiently safe.Ĭonsequently, the solution would have to be a new construction in virgin rocks without coal, and with additional cooling for bringing temperatures down to freezing levels, which are the standard conditions in gene banks. In looking toward Norway’s establishment of a global gene bank, a feasibility study carried out in 2004 revealed that the permafrost – which maintained a temperature of approximately -3,5☌ – was not optimal for the high security storage of the global heritage of genetic resources. Permafrost, available infrastructure and cooperation with the coal company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kullkompani led to the mid-1980s establishment of a gene bank that would conserve security copies of the Nordic seed collection in a steel container inside Coal Mine #3 in Longyearbyen. The Seed Vault was opened 26 February 2008 in the presence of the Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, the President of the European Union, José Manuel Barroso, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Jacques Diouf, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Wangari Maathai. Based on the results of a 2004 feasibility study and the endorsement and welcoming of the initiative by the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, in October 2004, the Norwegian Government committed to fund and establish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. With this in mind, the Government of Norway was approached by Bioversity International (then IPGRI) and encouraged to consider the establishment of a global facility at Svalbard. The Treaty calls for establishing a multilateral system for plant genetic resources that includes global rules for access to and benefit sharing of those resources.
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In 2001, negotiations that led to International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) were finalized, and the Treaty opened to signatures by national governments. In fact, today, there is often a misunderstanding that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is actually in an abandoned coal mine but, of course, it is carved into the solid rock of a permafrost mountain. In 1984, the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) had established a back-up seed storage facility in an abandoned coal mine outside Longyearbyen, and the idea of establishing a worldwide back-up storage gradually evolved.