Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map). Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.
A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.
When did syria get doomsday vault free#
In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status.
The company says being inside a mountain increases security, while the permafrost offers a “fail-safe” seed conservation method.Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t The Svalbard vault, however, is protected by its remote and very chilly location. They will be sent once paperwork is completed, she said.”Īccording to Crop Trust, there are some 1,700 seed banks in the world, but many of them are vulnerable to natural disasters, war and even mundane hazards like insufficient funding or a broken freezer. “ICARDA wants almost 130 boxes out of 325 it had deposited in the vault, containing a total of 116,000 samples, she told Reuters. ICARDA moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war. “Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, said the seeds had been requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). Reuters reports that the seeds requested by researchers include “samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions” to replace “seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.” But the human toll isn’t the only cost of the violence. More than 250,000 people have been killed in the ongoing Syrian civil war and millions of others have been forced from their homes. This is why we urged them to deposit so early on.” “But knew in 2008 that Syria was in for an interesting couple of years. “We did not expect a retrieval this early,” Crop Trust spokesman Brian Lainoff told NPR. What apocalyptic event prompted the removal of some of humanity’s food backups? It is the final back up.”īut now, less than 10 years after the opening, officials are preparing to withdraw seeds for the first time. It will secure, for centuries, millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today. “The purpose of the Vault is to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections. Crop Trust, the company that runs the seed vault, says on its website that the vault is “the final backup”: Extending nearly 500 feet into the mountain, it’s intended to safeguard the planet’s food supply and biodiversity in the event a doomsday catastrophe like nuclear war or crippling disease wipes out varieties of plants.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008, stores more than 850,000 seed samples from nations all over the world. But the gray building holds the key to the earth’s biodiversity. Narrow and sharply edged, the facility cuts an intimidating figure against the barren Arctic background. A tall rectangular building juts out of a mountainside on a Norwegian island just 800 miles from the North Pole.
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