Oslo: Ukraine, a major grain producer, has deposited seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway's Arctic for the first time since 2012, after joining a UN-backed treaty on food and agriculture genetics earlier this year.
Housed deep in mountain tunnels around 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) from the North Pole, the vault is a "Noah's Ark" of food crops, designed to preserve plant varieties from risks including natural disasters, wars, climate change and diseases.
Ukraine deposited 773 seed samples this week, including various types of sunflowers, grains, buckwheat and forage crops, the Norwegian agriculture ministry said in a statement late Wednesday.
It was Ukraine's first deposit since 2012, it added, and followed the country's joining of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, negotiated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
Often described as "Europe's breadbasket", Ukraine has a major gene collection of its own, with more than 154,000 samples representing around 2,000 species, according to the FAO.
Its national gene bank, located in Kharkiv in the east of the country, saw its buildings and infrastructure damaged by Russian shelling in 2022, before its collection was moved west, far from the front lines, Norway's agriculture ministry said.
The Global Seed Vault, inaugurated in 2008 with funding from Norway, consists of three cold chambers that now house more than 1.4 million samples, which their owners can withdraw anytime.
Far from conflict zones and at an altitude that protects it from rising sea levels, the vault is designed to withstand disasters, even in the event of refrigeration system failure, thanks to its location beneath the permafrost.
It has nonetheless already been affected by global warming: in 2016, water infiltrated its access tunnel -- without reaching the seeds -- leading to $22 million of renovations to reinforce its waterproofing.
