SO SHALL WE REAP

In the December 2023 issue of Rural Delivery, we ran an article about seed storage (“Viable options,” by Zack Metcalfe) which mentioned the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Opened in 2008, this facility on the remote island of Spitsbergen, in northern Norway, now contains 1.25 million samples from around the world, making it the largest and most diverse seed library on Earth – and it has the capacity to hold 4.5 million samples. Two key figures in establishing this “Doomsday” vault, Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin and Dr. Cary Fowler, were recently named joint recipients of the 2024 World Food Prize, in recognition of their efforts to protect global crop biodiversity and food security. Hawtin is a British agricultural scientist and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, while Fowler is the U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. They will receive the award this October at the Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa.

The vault itself is a remarkable structure, designed to withstand nuclear war or the most powerful forces of nature. Accessed via a tunnel, it is embedded 430 feet into a sandstone mountain that is not subject to seismic activity, and a similar distance above sea level, safe from flooding as Arctic ice continues to thaw. Its roof and front entryway incorporate an installation called “Perpetual Repercussion” by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne – an assembly of prisms and mirrors and fibre-optic cables that makes the facility glow like a beacon on the desolate landscape.

“The seeds that are in there represent the history of agriculture. So what they really represent is the experiences that our crops have had over 12,000 to 15,000 years,” says Fowler, in a statement accompanying the award announcement. “We’ve co-evolved with each other. We both depend on each other, and we both reflect each other. Our agricultural system goes back hundreds of human generations. So all of our ancestors have had a role in conserving this diversity and handing it forward to us. We just have to hand it off to the next generation.”

Part of the inspiration for building the vault was to maintain plant genetics that may be needed for breeding crops that will be productive in a changing climate. So it was perhaps inauspicious when, in the spring of 2017, unprecedented warm weather caused melting of the permafrost that was supposed to help keep the vault cool, and the runoff, combined with unseasonal rainfall, flowed into the entryway. Though there was no damage and no immediate threat to the seed collection at the far end of the tunnel, the incident seemed like a reality check. Drainage trenches were added, and pumps were installed in the vault. This facility that was supposed to operate on autopilot is now subject to closer monitoring.

More than a feat of engineering, Svalbard represents a major achievement in international cooperation. Fowler and Hawtin were involved in years of United Nations negotiations leading to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which marks its 20th anniversary in 2024. The treaty promoted the sharing of crop resources among the 149 signatory countries, and recognized the importance of stable funding for gene banks – leading to the creation of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which ensures ongoing financial support for Svalbard.

The samples in the vault are duplicates of seeds held in gene banks around the world – and they are not donated, but only stored there as an emergency reserve. The countries and organizations that use the vault retain ownership of their seeds, and control any sharing of them. One of the major depositors, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), was forced to abandon its gene bank in Tel Hadya, Syria, due to the ongoing civil war in that country, so it made withdrawals from Svalbard in 2015 and 2017 – regenerating the seeds by planting crops in Lebanon and Morocco. Some of the resulting supply was deposited in ICARDA gene banks in those countries, and some was returned to the facility in Norway.

The World Food Prize is not entirely uncontroversial, partly because its founder, Norman E. Borlaug, was the agricultural scientist who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his key role in the Green Revolution – helping to bring high-yielding crop varieties and modern production methods to Mexico in the 1940s and ’50s, and later to Pakistan and India, and also Latin America. Originally trained as a forester, Borlaug argued that developing countries needed to adopt intensive farming in order to prevent deforestation, as they raced to feed their growing populations. He is widely credited with saving many lives, as well as many acres of woodland. However, some critics view this movement as a kind of quasi-humanitarian imperialism, as it created heavy reliance on expensive imported crop inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides – and moreover, it resulted in a loss of local agricultural knowledge and autonomy, as well as crop biodiversity.

For some, the Svalbard vault – despite its honourable intentions and its ethics protocols – is a monolithic symbol of concentrated control over global agriculture. This paradox is addressed in Jennifer Jewell’s book What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press, 2023). Jewell acknowledges that large seed banks serve an essential function, but she’s ambivalent. “They are often seen as representing government and big-business agendas, which may or may not be, and have not always played out to be in the best interests of the environment, biodiversity, or the bulk of humanity,” she says.

Jewell has a strong preference for “participatory conservation” initiatives arising from grassroots efforts, such as Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), which was established in 1975 to conserve and share heritage varieties. But having grown to more than 13,000 members, with an 890-acre farm headquarters in Iowa, this group had to become more professional and more institutional, to organize and protect its collection – and in 2009 it became an early contributor to the Svalbard seed vault. Conspiratorial thinking does not advance seed conservation, Jewell says, and worthwhile initiatives are not always compromised by corporate funding, as long as civil society is robust and fully engaged.

Jewell’s book is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions and surging interest in gardening resulted in seed shortages. She says this sense of scarcity was an alarm bell, “ringing loudly in my mammalian brain, triggering survival anxieties, and triggering a determined instinct to engage with my own survival. Our collective survival.” Geopolitical instability and climate change heightened the general sense of anxiety, but Jewell points out that “seed stewards” had been warning for years about the effects of consolidation in the seed industry – notably reduced choice, and reduced resiliency. She points out that if many people today are “plant blind,” then even more of us are “seed stupid.” We do not understand very well “how they work, how they’ve evolved, how they are being handled at legislative, commercial, or perhaps most importantly, cultural levels, and why this matters.”

I’m afraid I fall into that category. Although I try to support local, independent seed producers, I have also been known to grab an extra packet from the rack near the checkout at the hardware store – as if it were a commodity of basic utility and fungibility, like a bag of fence staples or spiral nails. I intend to spend some more time with this book. It’s not that long, but neither is it meant to be an easy read. It has a non-linear structure, interspersed with seasonal journal entries and quotes from numerous interviewees. It is wide-ranging, nuanced, and often poetic.

Jewell does a good job of outlining the history of the seed industry, but she devotes even more space to natural history, discussing the way seeds function in the wild – their physiology (awn, pappus, burr, capsule, drupe, follicle, schizocarp, etc.), and their frequently-amazing modes of dispersal and pollination. From observing seeds, she derives some attributes that have wider value for problem-solving and adaptation in human society: “generosity and abundance, and redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.”

Saving seeds is important, she says, but this has to be an active pursuit. It is not a task to be completed or perfected, but a process of continually learning and growing. “I feel sure that gardens and gardeners can save the world,” she says, “and that those gardens and gardeners are born of more fully understood, valued, heard, and heeded seed.”

HOUSEHOLD NOTE(S)

With this issue of Rural Delivery, we are sending out a hearty thank-you to Anne Gray, who is retiring from writing the Household Notes column – a gig she started in January of 1992. How many recipes is that? Quite a few. We are well aware that this feature is a highlight for many readers, who flip to those pages immediately when they receive the magazine in the mail. You could say that home cooking is one of our core values, and Anne has been our standard-bearer. But she has also played a large role behind the scenes – on the business side, and as a sharp-eyed proofreader with a keen sense of grammatical and agricultural accuracy. We appreciate all she has done to support and shape Rural Delivery over the years. Anne is irreplaceable, but we ask you to welcome Elisabeth Bailey, a Lunenburg-based food enthusiast and cookbook author who is taking on Household Notes – bringing a different perspective and style, no doubt, but conveying the same appreciation for wholesome and delicious food that anyone can prepare. Now go ahead and flip to page 38! DL