Sowing for Apocalypse.(Essay)

A cold drizzle was falling over St. Petersburg last March, and the gray morning light filtered through the grimy windows of the ceremonial rooms of the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, one of the oldest seed banks--and the most storied--in the world, situated on St. Isaac's Square. In one of the rooms, a woman in a smock sat at a table with a brown packet, and its contents, pea seeds, spilled out over the table in front of her. She did not look up from sorting through the seeds as two visitors passed, and, with her lips moving silently, she appeared to be lost in thought, or prayer.

Cary Fowler had an appointment to meet the director general of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko, in order to discuss the institute's seeds. Fowler, an American, is the world's seed banker. It's a nebulously defined position, yet a critical one. As the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway, Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of about two million varieties of food plants--both the familiar domesticated crops and many of their wild relatives--in order to create the first global seed bank.

We tend to imagine apocalypse coming in the form of a bomb, an asteroid, or a tsunami, but should a catastrophe strike one of the world's major crops Fowler and his fellow seed bankers may be all that stand between us and widespread starvation. Any of the diseases currently active in the United States--the rust fungus attacking soybeans; the potato late blight (the same one that caused the Irish potato famine), which turns potatoes into a black mass of rot; the Western bean cutworm, which feeds on corn plants--has the potential to turn into a devastating nationwide scourge. Should that happen, the only remedy--genetic resistance--might lie in an obscure variety, stored in a seed bank.

The Vavilov Institute is a monument to the extraordinary sacrifices people have made in order to save seeds. During the winter of 1941-42, when Hitler's troops were blockading Leningrad, cutting off food and supplies, the scientists who worked there protected the seeds stored inside the buildings, which amounted to several tons of nutritious food, from the starving Russians outside. At night, thousands of rats would invade the laboratories; the staff guarded the seed collections with metal rods. When some collections of potatoes needed resowing during the winter, institute workers found a plot outside Leningrad, near the front. Eventually, much of the collection was smuggled out over frozen Lake Ladoga, to a hiding place in the Ural Mountains. A. G. Stchukin, a specialist in peanuts, died of starvation in the building, as did D. S. Ivanov, a rice specialist, both surrounded by thousands of packets of seeds.

The story of what happened at the Vavilov Institute has a mythic resonance in the mind of every seed banker, and Fowler glanced around almost reverently as he walked through the shadowy halls. One of his personal heroes is Nikolai Vavilov, the Russian biologist and plant breeder for whom the institute is named--and the first man to dream of creating a world seed bank. For Fowler, coming here, to arrange for the institute to send seeds to the Svalbard vault, in time for its opening, in February, 2008, was, in a sense, finishing the job that Vavilov had started. And Vavilov himself was following in a tradition of seed saving that reaches back into prehistory.

Agriculture is thought to have begun around 8000 B.C., in the semi-arid mountains of Mesopotamia. Flint sickles and grinding stones discovered in the region suggest that the first farmers collected wild grains, which were developed over time into wheat and barley. Plants were also domesticated by other civilizations in other parts of the world, almost certainly independently. In Southeast Asia, farming began with the domestication of rice, around 6500 B.C.; in Mesoamerica, maize and squash were domesticated between 8000 and 5000 B.C. In each case, a legume was domesticated along with a grain or cereal: lentils with wheat in the Mediterranean; beans with maize in South America; soybeans with rice in Asia. Eating both together provided early humans with the right balance of protein and fat. Of the two hundred and fifty thousand known plant species in the world, only about two hundred are cultivated for food, and the vast majority of the world's food comes from just twenty crops, in eight plant families. It is a measure of the skill of the early farmers that almost all the plants we use in agriculture today were domesticated before historical times.

From the beginning, farmers must have realized that by saving a certain portion of the seeds from the previous year's crop they could insure themselves of a future harvest. (In Jarmo, Iraq, archeologists have found seed deposits that date from 6750 B.C.) Seed saving was one of the most important acts that a farming community performed. Seeds had to be protected from weather and animals--insects as well as mammals. One early method of preservation was to pack seeds and ash inside baskets, and then bury the baskets in the ground. Seeds were also sealed inside adobe structures, and kept in elevated thatched huts. When the community moved, it took its seeds along, too.