War on Russian Seedbank Could Leave Food Future Out in the Cold

The Pavlovsk Experimental Station,  is a seedbank founded  in 1926.  Seeds are stored as a source for planting in case seed reserves elsewhere are destroyed. It is a type of gene bank. The seeds stored may be food crops, or those of rare species to protect biodiversity. The reasons for storing seeds may be varied. In the case of food crops, many useful plants that were developed over centuries are now no longer used for commercial agricultural production and are becoming rare. Storing seeds also guards against catastrophic events like natural disasters, outbreaks of disease, or war.

The fate of the station is now in limbo as, after an intense lobbying campaign by botanists and conservation groups around the world, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has announced that the government is investigating the effort to uproot one of the most valuable botanical collections on Earth. The station seems destined to fall victim to a drive by the Russian government to free up public land for sale to developers.

The heat wave and subsequent fires that have destroyed much of Russia's wheat harvest this year may have helped increase the chances that Vavilov's storehouse of plants will live on at Pavlovsk. The fires triggered new fears in Russia about the nation's ability to feed itself and the impact of global warming, and raised the profile of scientists working to protect the country's food varieties. As the heat wave has faded, many Russians are now hoping that Pavlovsk can be saved.

The Pavlovsk Research Station, part of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, houses one of the world's largest collections of seeds and planted crops, roughly 90 percent of which are found in no other scientific collections in the world. The station's inventory includes almost a thousand types of strawberries from more than 40 countries; a similar number of black currant varieties from 30 countries, including North America, Europe and the Far East; 600 apple types collected from 35 countries; and more than a hundred varieties each of gooseberries, cherries, plums, red currants, and raspberries. More than half of the black currant varieties grown in Russia, the world's leading producer, were bred at Pavlovsk. Sales of black currants in Russia are valued at more than $400 million annually.

Please visit our Petition page to sign up to help protect this invaluable resource.  Further information regarding this topic can be found at  guardian.co.uk