LONGYEARBYEN, Norway, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Norway's Global Seed Vault, which protects humanity's existing food crops, celebrated its first anniversary by taking delivery of 4 tons of critical seeds.
The Thursday shipment -- consisting of nearly 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species from Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, the United States, Syria, Mexico and Colombia -- was delivered to the repository near the village of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
During its first year the vault has amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples -- some 200 million seeds, officials said.
"The vault was opened last year to ensure that one day all of humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely protected from any threat to agricultural production, natural or man made," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which operates the vault in partnership with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden. "It's amazing how far we have come toward accomplishing that goal."
