April 19, 2007 — A Gates Foundation grant will help developing countries send the seeds of "critical" food crops to a doomsday seed vault in an Arctic deep freeze, the recipients said Thursday.
"The fight against hunger cannot be won without securing fast-disappearing crop biodiversity," the Global Crop Diversity Trust and its partner the U.N. Foundation said in announcing the $30 million grant.
Part of the grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which the Norwegian government added $7.5 million in matching funds, will go toward helping poor countries send seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
The so-called "Noah's Ark of food" near the North Pole will store at least 450,000 seed samples at a temperature of minus 0.4 Fahrenheit.
The grant will finance the packaging and shipping of seeds to the fault, Cary Fowler of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust said.
The funding is "the largest crop biodiversity preservation grant ever made," the group said in a statement.
"Among the crops covered are many 'orphan crops' — crops particularly important to the poor but largely neglected by modern plant breeding, despite the need for high-yielding, nutritious varieties," the statement said.
The initiative "will secure at-risk collections in poor countries and document their astonishing diversity, making it available to meet the food needs of the poor," trust director Cary Fowler said in the statement.
