北極種子庫接收稀有寄存

Recently Yahoo News on-line reported the following:

Arctic seed vault to receive rare deposits

Sun, February 13, 2022, 2:10 AM

By Gwladys Fouche

OSLO (Reuters) - A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world's crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organisation that made a withdrawal from the facility.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world.

On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections.

The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples.

ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 2017 and 2019 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco.

"The fact that the seed collection destroyed in Syria during the civil war has been systematically rebuilt shows that the vault functions as an insurance for current and future food supply and for local food security," said Norwegian International Development Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim.

The vault, which holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally, also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties.

The world used to cultivate over 6,000 different plants but U.N. experts say we now get about 40% of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.

Translation

奧斯陸（路透社）-  一個建在北極山腰上，用於保存世界作物免受戰爭、疾病和其他災難的影響的種子寄存庫，將於週一收到新的寄存，其中包括來自第一次從該設施提取的組織的寄存。

Svalbard 全球種子庫位於挪威大陸和北極之間的 Spitsbergen 島上，每年只開放幾次，以限制其種子庫與外界的接觸。

週一，來自蘇丹、烏干達、新西蘭、德國和黎巴嫩的基因庫將存進包括小米、高粱和小麥在內的種子，作為他們自己收藏的備份。

由於敘利亞戰爭，國際乾旱地區農業研究中心 (ICARDA) 於 2012 年將其總部從Aleppo遷至貝魯特，該中心將存放約 8,000 個樣本。

ICARDA 於 2015 年首次從寄存庫中提取出種子以替換因戰爭而受損的藏品，並在 2017 年和 2019 年再次提取以重建自己的藏品，目前存放在黎巴嫩和摩洛哥。

挪威國際發展部長 Anne Beathe Tvinnereim 說： “敘利亞在內戰期間被毀的種子收集已經系統地重建，這一事實表明，寄存庫可以作為當前和未來糧食供應, 及為當地糧食安全作出保險” 。

該寄存庫擁有來自全球 89 個種子庫的近 6,000 種植物的 110 萬多份種子樣本，也可作為植物育種者開發新作物品種的後盾。

世界過去種植了 6000 多種不同的植物，但聯合國專家表示，現在我們從三種主要作物 - 玉米、小麥和大米中獲取約 40% 的卡路里 - 如果氣候變化導致收成歉收，糧食供應就會變得脆弱。

       So, the vault in north pole holds seed samples of plant species globally, and serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties. Seeds are getting more important as  many areas are suffering from harvest failure that  makes food supplies vulnerable due to climate change.