Construction began on the vault on Monday, to be carved deep in permafrost in the side of a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole.

Built with top security, the three-million-dollar depository will preserve around three million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops at sub-zero temperatures.

Cary Fowler, the executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international non-profit organization that supports the world's most critical crop collections currently scattered among some 1,400 gene banks, is the brains behind the idea.

According to him, the main threat to the world's crops is probably not a nuclear war. Rather, it is annual budget cuts at plant institutes and their gene banks around the world, as well as the occasional power failure that thaws seeds so that they fail to germinate.

"Of course there is also a risk of wars and other catastrophes wiping out a whole institute. But in most cases there are no big headlines when a variety is irrevocably lost," he tells AFP in an interview.

Convincing the world of the problem has not been easy, however.

"Part of the problem is you can go into a meeting and mention gene banks, and people's eyes glaze over. Maybe they recall a high school biology class they did poorly in," he says.

"But people get a perception of the magnitude of the loss when I tell them that at the end of the 1800s, 7,000 named apple varieties were grown in the United States. Now, 6,800 of those are as extinct as the dinosaurs."

Fowler, in his mid-50s with curly red hair, grew up near Memphis, Tennessee and spent a lot of his youth on his grandmother's farm.

After earning a PhD in social sciences at Sweden's University of Uppsala, his life changed in the early 1970s after he read a paper by botanist Jack Harlan, entitled "Genetics of Disaster".

Harlan was a plant explorer, geneticist and breeder who understood crops, their origins and their use in sustaining mankind.

His seed collections from 35 countries are stored in gene banks throughout the world. Some samples have been returned to their home countries after they were lost from local gene banks.

His work inspired Fowler.

"What we will store on Svalbard is not just one or two million seed samples and germ plasm, but the work of countless generations of farmers for thousands of years. Our crops are the oldest artefacts in the world, they are older than the pyramids, and they are alive."

No nation has ever maintained a prosperous food system based on genetic resources of purely indigenous origin.

"Today maize, a native of Central America, is the predominant food crop in southern Africa. ... Soybean, a species from China and East Asia, is now a major crop in the US and Brazil," Fowler says.

The best-known case of a crop almost wiped out is the 19th century Irish potato famine, which led to more than a million deaths. The country had relied on only one variety of one crop for its staple food, and that variety had no resistance to disease.

"There wasn't enough genetic diversity to provide protection. Without being able to go back to the many wild species and to the hundreds of farmers' varieties from Latin America, none of us would be eating potatoes today."

The road to the Svalbard vault was a long and bumpy one, but Fowler has played a major role at each stage, from inventories of plant resources to resolving ownership issues.

"This is the only major problem in the world right now that I say, with a straight face, 'We can actually solve this! This is the one major problem we can fix, put on the back burner and move on to something else'."

The Trust will work closely with the Food and Agriculture Organisation to help support gene banks around the world, which will remain the first line of defence.

"But the more I see of the various threats to crop diversity, the better I feel about Svalbard."

"In 100 or 200 years the Norwegian government of today may not be remembered for anything else than building the vault on Svalbard. Such are the immense implications of the vault for the world," Fowler says.

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