THE SEED BANK IDEA was first conceived by Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov. In the early 1900’s he gathered seeds on five continents from wild relatives and varieties of the crops we eat, in order to preserve genes that confer essential characteristics as disease and pest resistance and the ability to withstand extreme climate conditions. He created the first global seed bank. The Research Institute of Plant Industry, in St. Petersburg now manages the collection.

There are some 1,400 seed banks around the world. Seed banks range from large to small local efforts.

Many seed banks have met their demise for a number of reasons including wars, climate change, management, etc.

The challenge now is to keep up with a diminishing food supply in the face of obvious climate change that has already contributed to severe droughts around the world through preserving seeds and plant species.

Marie Haga, Executive Director of Global Crop Diversity Trust says, “Simply put, without protecting crop diversity we risk losing the raw materials needed to feed the planet. Only about 150 crops, and a relatively small number of varieties of each of these, are cultivated on a large scale around the world.”

In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only up to a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world's food varieties over the past century.