This is where Svalbard and the idea of a global insurance policy entered the picture. This depressing background explains why a “Plan B” was desperately needed, yet almost impossible to imagine. Accidents, mismanagement, equipment failures, wars, and natural disasters have also taken a toll. Collections became victim to anemic budgets and a reluctance to allow genetic resources out of their native country, even if only for safety duplication. National gene banks have languished, and the biological diversity in their care has deteriorated or even been lost. The jealous guarding of such collections has rarely been matched by funding adequate for their conservation. Consequently, some of the world's most important gene banks, holding tens of thousands of unique varieties, have not provided a single sample to a foreigner in years, even though gene banks are highly dependent on crops and crop diversity that originate elsewhere. Yet over the past 20 years, many countries have closed their borders to outgoing samples for fear of “biopiracy,” the idea that a recipient might acquire intellectual property rights through such a sample and reap undeserved benefits. International agricultural research centers, as well as some countries, have traditionally been willing to give samples from their collections to others. What is really going on? Despite the gathering together of so many seeds in Svalbard, no legal basis existed for the sharing of crop diversity until as recently as 2001, when the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was adopted. Popular press reports about the “Doomsday Vault,” however, typically mask the complexity of the endeavor and, if anything, underestimate its practical utility. It's little wonder that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has captured the public's imagination more than almost any agricultural topic in recent years. The samples constitute the very foundation of agriculture, the biological diversity needed so the world's major food crops can adapt to the next pest or disease, or to climate change.
![seed vault seed vault](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/284940430738_/SanDisk-Extreme-25-1-TB-External-SSD-SDSSDE61-1T00-G25.jpg)
Deep inside a mountain near the North Pole, down a fortified tunnel, and behind airlocked doors in a vault frozen to −18 degrees Celsius, scientists are squirreling away millions of seed samples. It could easily provide the back-drop for a James Bond movie.