Devex Dish: Global food security could rely on this Arctic facility

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the island of Spitsbergen in a remote Norwegian archipelago, safeguards global seed supply from 89 seed banks around the world in case samples at those facilities are destroyed due to disease, war, climate change, or other crises. The Arctic Circle facility opened in 2008 and holds nearly 6,000 plant species in the form of over 1.1 million seed samples, which can be thawed from their deep freeze to develop new crop varieties.

On Monday, the seed vault was scheduled to receive new samples from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany, and Lebanon. The seeds, which include key grain staples such as wheat, sorghum, and millet, are duplicates of ones in countries’ existing collections.

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas planned to deposit 8,000 samples. That facility, which used to be based in Aleppo but moved its headquarters to Lebanon because of the war in Syria, has also withdrawn samples from the seed vault over the past few years to rebuild its own stock.

But the seed vault, owned by the Norwegian government and located so remotely to ensure nothing could touch its precious contents, isn’t safe, either: It was affected by climate change in 2017. The seeds were not harmed, but the vault’s entrance tunnel flooded when above-average temperatures saw the usual snow turn to rain and the permafrost melt.

The incident was a wake-up call about the true security of the seeds stored there, and the vault’s managers began monitoring the facility 24 hours a day. The Norwegian government has since spent €20 million ($22.7 million) to make it “absolutely watertight.”

Access to quality seeds is fundamental for farmers to have successful harvests, and it plays a role in food security from the local to the global scale. If you recall, last fall I reported on Haiti’s struggles in getting access to quality seeds that would allow farmers to build resilience to climate change and grow more nutritious crops.

Book club: Interested in learning more about the vital role that so-called heirloom seeds play in the food system? I recommend “The Seed Keeper,” a novel set in the ancestral land of the Dakota people, which we call Minnesota (where I grew up), that details the lengths Indigenous people were forced to go to to preserve seeds for their crops.

ICYMI on Devex Pro: Seed access woes prevent growth of Haitian agriculture

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Number munching

That’s the number of Tesla shares that CEO Elon Musk gave to charity in November — just days after WFP Executive Director David Beasley engaged in a Twitter back-and-forth aimed at convincing the billionaire to donate money to help end global hunger. (Loyal Dish readers will remember I was a bit obsessed with this last year.)

WFP hasn’t disclosed any information about a possible donation from Musk — but Beasley continued to publicly suggest that the Tesla founder should ante up after Musk was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” in December. What do you think? Is there any chance Beasley’s Twitter campaign was successful? Write me with your thoughts at dish@devex.com.

Catch up: My colleagues Stephanie Beasley and Shabtai Gold looked into how the Elon Musk-WFP Twitter feud raised accountability questions, pushing the WFP to explain its numbers and pledge transparency.

The only option

Over the next 10 years, 1,000 farmers are set to participate in a study conducted by the Ecdysis Foundation to analyze the benefits of regenerative agriculture, or linking farming practices with the wider ecosystem to safeguard land and reduce the effects of climate change.

Foundation Director Jonathan Lundgren told me how the South Dakota-based organization, which researches sustainable agriculture practices, aims to empirically demonstrate the benefits of regenerative agriculture.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the benefits of regenerative agriculture over traditional agriculture?

There’s four general outcomes that we’re trying to attain: improving soil health, increasing life on farms — biodiversity conservation — while growing nutritious food, profitably.

It could be carbon sequestration, improvement of rural communities, increasing rare and threatened species; there’s a lot of different combinations of practices to attain these principles, depending on where you live and what you grow.

The only way we’re going to get out of this climate crisis is with regenerative ag. There really isn’t another option. We have to use our land in the way that nature designed it in order to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere.

What data will your project gather about regenerative agriculture?

Right now, a lot of what’s going on with regenerative agriculture is anecdotal success stories of farmers that are making this happen. It’s hard to make decisions [based] on those success stories. It’s easy to dismiss those things. That’s where science can really come in and help.

Your project is currently contained to U.S. farms, but what will you learn that can be applied around the world?

The template that we’re developing here for U.S. farms, and actually North American farms, is going to be almost perfectly transferable to other areas of the globe. We’re thinking about how to make that transition happen. By doing this on a continental scale, we’re incorporating an awful lot of different types of habitats and ecozones, [such] that we should expect similar responses in other places on the planet.

+ ICYMI: Promoting regenerative agriculture was among the commitments that companies made at the U.N. Food Systems Summit last year. But there’s a need for a strong corporate accountability framework if those promises are to come true, according to a Devex op-ed by Sofía Monsalve Suárez and Ashka Naik.

Guac softly and carry a big stick

The U.S. government has suspended avocado imports from Mexico following a threat made to a U.S. safety inspector in the state of Michoacán. The inspector, who “received a threatening message on his official cellphone,” was working to ensure that Mexican avocados don’t carry diseases that could harm U.S. crops. Growers in Michoacán, the only Mexican state fully authorized to export to the United States, often experience extortion by gang members.

Although the announcement was made the day before the Super Bowl, game day guacamole was unaffected because enough avocados had already arrived on store shelves.

What’s your favorite creative recipe to make with avocados? Send it to me at dish@devex.com and we might feature it in a future edition.

Meanwhile, abroad: Farmers from Bomet county in Kenya's South Rift region have swapped their eucalyptus trees for avocado trees to safeguard their water resources and earn extra income from sales of the fruit.

Chew on this

The amount of plastic flowing into the Mediterranean Sea each year matches the volume of fish taken out from the two most commonly caught species. [Devex]

Solving the Afghan food crisis is “not very complicated,” says International Rescue Committee chief David Miliband. [Devex]

In fiscal year 2021, the USAID Advancing Nutrition program launched its first activity for developing the capacity of local groups to address malnutrition, with partners located in Kenya and Burkina Faso. [USAID]