Seeds of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut and six small millets will be transferred by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from its headquarters in Patencheru, near Hyderabad to this location, 1000 km from the Arctic.

William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT, is at Svalbard for the opening celebrations tomorrow. He will join European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Mathai in this global initiative.

Norway is footing the $8.9-million bill for building the Arctic archipelago where, ironically, no crops grow. Secured behind an airlock door, the three airtight chambers can house duplicates of samples from the world’s more than 1,400 existing seed banks.

The Norwegian archipelago was selected for its inhospitable climate as well as its remote location. The seeds of wheat, maize, oats and other crops will be stored at a constant temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius, and even if the freezer system fails, the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above 3.5 degrees Celsius below freezing.

This project is important as some of the world’s biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

Seed banks have begun contributing: potato seeds from Peru; 30,000 samples of different beans from Colombia; 47,000 seed samples of wheat and 10,000 types of maize from Mexico and thousands of rice varieties from Philippines. Pakistan and Kenya, both wracked by serious unrest, have sent seed collections too.

By the time of the inauguration on Tuesday, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will hold some 250,000 samples, which will remain the property of their countries of origin.

According to Dar, ICRISAT’s participation adds a special significance to the project — it gives increased protection to global agriculture from climate change.

“Mandated to increase agricultural productivity in the drylands of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, our crops have the ability to withstand the perils of climate variability and change,” Dar told The Indian Express. “Our seeds to be stored in the Svalbard seed vault means that we are storing the seeds of hope for posterity.”

ICRISAT will deposit 20,000 seed germplasm lines in the first instalment this year, the first of the five-year schedule during which the Institute will transfer about 110,000 germplasm accessions.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust, one of the agencies supporting the project and a partner of ICRISAT, is providing financial support for the transfer of samples.

The samples being sent to Svalbard are duplicates of the collection at ICRISAT’s gene bank at Patancheru which holds 118,882 germplasm lines of various crops, along with their wild relatives, representing 144 countries.

Earlier, these seeds stored in genebanks have been used to re-start agriculture in areas affected by natural disasters and civil strife. For instance, sorghum germplasm lost during civil wars in Ethiopia and Rwanda was replenished from the collection stored in the ICRISAT genebank. ICRISAT repatriated germplasm to several countries: Iran for chickpea, Kenya for pigeonpea and Zambia for sorghum.