The New Scientist’s blogger manages to confuse the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with the Millennium Seed Bank. I guess it was inevitable.
LATER: No, it wasn’t me that left that first, rude comment! And I’m offended that you think it might have been.
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Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The New Scientist’s blogger manages to confuse the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with the Millennium Seed Bank. I guess it was inevitable.
LATER: No, it wasn’t me that left that first, rude comment! And I’m offended that you think it might have been.
I just posted a comment to the New Scientist article to try to clarify some of the mix-ups between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Millennium Seed Bank.
This is my second entry on this thread. In my first I said I had “just posted” a comment to the New Scientist article on the New Scientist blog. Lest anyone think I posted the one Luigi refers to as “rude,” I did not. I posted another comment, detailed but polite (at least it was intended to be polite), but New Scientist has not yet put it up. When you post there, or try to, you get a notice saying the blogger will review comments before they go up. I guess we’re still in the review phase.
In any case, let me reiterate here that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (dubbed the “Doomsday Vault” by the media) is NOT in financial trouble. Not at all. For more information, check out: http://www.croptrust.org. There have been some reports (such as the New Scientist piece in question) about the Millennium Seed Bank experiencing some financial constraints, but I really don’t know about this and thus cannot comment. Their website is at http://www.kew.org/msbp. Needless to say, these are two different and institutionally independent facilities, in two different places, with two different but ultimately complementary functions.