Housing Development Threatens Russian Seed Bank

(Aug. 11) -- During World War II, 12 Russian scientists starved to death at a biodiversity seed bank in what was then called Leningrad, choosing to die rather than eat the rare specimens of seeds and plants they'd dedicated their careers to protecting.

Now that same seed bank, the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, which houses the world's largest collection of European fruits and berries, faces destruction by the Russian government to make way for a private housing development outside St. Petersburg.

Established in 1926, the station keeps about 320,000 delicate seed samples and plants, the vast majority of which are extinct elsewhere in nature. The collection includes more than 1,000 types of strawberries and hundreds of varieties of apples, pears and plums. They're all insurance for biodiversity and food security -- and increasingly important amid climate change, when the world may need to genetically create new types of plants that can survive in hotter, drier climates.

"The collection is a source of genes to develop many new varieties of fruits and berries, and it is also a huge cultural heritage," Sergey Alexanian, head of the Department of International Relations at the Vavilov Institute, which runs the seed bank, told the BBC.

Unlike the other seed banks around the world that freeze-dry specimens to preserve them, most of the Pavlovsk station's samples are living plants that need to be physically in the ground to survive. "It's an entire garden, not just seeds; you can't relocate a garden," Alexanian told the BBC.

The debate over the seed bank's fate has particular resonance in Russia this summer, as the country battles the worst wildfires on record and the worst drought in decades. The death rate in Moscow from suffocating smog and heat has doubled to 700 victims a day. Hundreds of thousands of acres of crops have been burned, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has canceled all grain exports for the rest of the year.

"The importance of Pavlovsk and all collections of genetic diversity lies not in the past but in the future. How will Russian agriculture cope if this year's heat wave becomes the normal pattern for the future?" Emile Frison, director of Bioversity International, told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Russia's plan to destroy the station represents the "most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity, at least in my lifetime," Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust told The New York Times. The trust is asking supporters to sign an online petition or send Twitter messages to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

A legal battle over the station's fate began late last year, when Russia's Ministry of Economic Development revoked the Vavilov Research Institute's rights to two pieces of land, one of which houses part of the seed bank. Control of the land was transferred to a government real estate fund in charge of repurposing agricultural land for housing, and it's expected to sell off the parcel to a private developer to build single-family homes. All of the land is technically owned by the government.

A Russian court ruled today that the land may be turned over to the Russian Housing Development Foundation, The Scientist and Science reported. The Vavilov Institute said it would appeal.

The Pavlovsk station was founded by Nikolai Vavilov, who also came up with the idea of seed banks. There are now about 1,400 such facilities around the world, operated mostly by governments and universities.