It has a pretty good start on that number, which beckons one to follow the money. It is reaching out to even more national governments, foundations, and agribusiness titans with a goal of raising $850 million. That’s why the Crop Trust isn’t done asking for money. That doesn’t bode well in an era of climate change, where we need to use that diversity to adapt our crops.Ĭlearly, the stated goal of the Svalbard Seed Vault is long-term sustainability of seed genes and the human population, which by 2100 will have ballooned to an eye-popping 11 billion. I do worry that while we have really big collections for the top 15 major crops, we’re deficient in the rest. Each unit is strictly isolated to maintain exclusive access for the national account holder.
Seeds are the only materials stored in these boxes - they are not shared or aggregated in any way. They are heftily barricaded to stave off cross-contamination. The so-called “Doomsday Vault” is owned and operated by Norway however, the Norwegian government has no access to the content of any deposits, which are kept in a chamber with a strictly maintained temperature of -18C.
According to Cary Fowler, who from 2005-2012 served as executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (which helped create the Svalbard vault), the ostensible goal of this system is to preserve crop diversity in regions plagued by war and civil turmoil: With the two most reviled Big Agro corporations on the planet involved, this is not surprising - nor is it particularly stunning that some conspiracy theorists regard the vault as yet another indicator that Bill Gates has a depopulation plan in mind.Ĭonspiracy theories aside, the new documentary does confirm that though apocalypse readiness was not one of the intended functions of the “Doomsday Vault,” it has become an inadvertent utility. And they invested big: the Bill Gates Foundation alone has poured in $30 million.Ĭonspiracy theorists have speculated that the agricultural bank is related to knowledge of an impending apocalypse. Originally conceived in the 1980s as a 100-year experiment to test the durability of seeds in cold environments, the project struggled to find donors -that is, until an eyebrow-raising team of behemoths, including the Bill Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto, and Syngenta – decided to invest. Buried under the permafrost of Norway, the vault is now home to over 500,000 samples of crop germplasms. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been in service for over six years, but the public remains mystified by the project. The reality of what’s going on is a bit less dramatic, yet somehow more unnerving and awe-inspiring. Jutting out of the ice with a glowing fiber-optic display, the entrance of the Svalbard vault immediately conjures visions of a vast underground military installation. The facts alone make the “Vault” sound like it was taken out of a James Bond movie: 130 meters up in the glacial mountains of Norway, there is a disaster-proof, permafrost-insulated seed bank depository that, in the event of an apocalyptic event, could repopulate the Earth with virtually every known crop. If you have heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it has likely been either in the context of a conspiracy theory or some cryptic reference in a science journal.
A new documentary called The Seeds of Time is bringing the mythic “Doomsday Vault” of Norway back into the limelight.
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