I was looking through an old Seed magazine ( "Science is Culture" is there header), and was reading up on how a small group of Artic Ocean islands, north of Norway, will become home to the world's largest bank of seeds. I realized it was from 2007 so I decided to look at their website to try to get an update.
I searched the article's name, and the Svalbard bank, a project of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which was to function as a centralized depository located on or inside politically stable ground. The Svalbard vault which is built into a sandstone mountain is to withstand just about any imaginable catastrophe. One of the questions and challenges was how to get the seeds to Svalbard intact, along with building a digital infrastructure to sort and catalogue the seeds currently stored in places from Colorado, to Peru to Zambia. The deposit opened in the winter of 2008. A strong interest and point to the article was how protecting this genetic material , which is the foundation of all agriculture and the link or wall between thriving societies and potential societies, is more important now than ever.
This article came out nearly 3 years ago, and as I tried to look into what had happened here, there wasn't much I could find. I wonder whether or not it has advanced or helped in this 3 year span since this was written, but it sounds like we are finding ourselves still in a place where these genetic material and seeds are more relevant and crucial as ever to find a solution and way to feed the world.
I did find an article titled Scientific Flip Flop.
It is a debate between "5 experts" who discuss the roots of the GM opposition, whether we've achieved real scientific consensus and the role of big "agribussiness."
The article starts it's debate discussing a pest resistant maize manufactured by Monsanto called "Mon 810"
But even though Mon 810 has an official sanction under EU law, countries such as France, Austria, Greece, Hungary, and Luxembourg have imposed national bans on the GE crop and apparently Germany was just added to this list.
That's huge.
Apparently Europe in general is turning increasingly against GE crops.
Most Europeans do not seem to be anti-science, in fact Europe fully embraces the scientific consencus on global warming. So another question and debate of this article investigates whether or not it is about the technology itself or the mistrust of "big agribusiness."
I think these are obvious questions we have been pondering ourselves in class with this last debate!
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/scientific_flip-flop/\
thats the link!
Bird
