New Seed Samples Deposited in Svalbard Global Seed Vault

13,000 seed samples from 21 gene banks were deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week.

This was announced by the Norwegian Government in a press release.

The seed samples include essential varieties of sorghum and pearl millet from Sudan’s crop genebank, a collection nearly destroyed during the country’s civil war, so-called “velvet beans” from Malawi that support both sustainable agriculture and traditional medicine, critical food crops from a Philippine genebank that’s been ravaged by typhoons and fires and a major collection of more than 3,000 varieties of rice, beans and maize from Brazil.