Gwladys Foouche

OSLO, (Reuters) – A vault constructed on an Arctic mountainside in order to save the world’s crops seeds from disease and war will get new deposits Monday. This includes one deposit from the first institution that withdrawn from the facility.

To limit the exposure of its seed banks to the outside, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is closed only a few times per year. It’s located on Spitsbergen, halfway between Norway and North Pole.

Gene banks in New Zealand, Germany, Lebanon, Sudan and Uganda will deposit their seeds on Monday as back-ups for their collections.

Some 8,000 samples will be deposited by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, which relocated its headquarters from Aleppo in 2012.

ICARDA pulled the first seed from the vault to replace a damaged collection in 2015. It made two additional withdrawals in 2017-2019 to rebuild its own collections.

Anne Beathe Tvinnereim, Norwegian International Development Minister said that “the fact that Syria’s seed collection was destroyed during civil war is a sign that it has been rebuilt systematically.”

Plant breeders can also use the vault to store over 1.1million seed samples representing nearly 66,000 plant species.

There were over 6000 different kinds of plants in the past. However, U.N. experts claim that 40% of calories are now obtained from 3 main crops. Climate change could make food supplies more vulnerable.