Agricultural non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in India and elsewhere are criticising the newly-opened Global Seed Vault (GSV) at Svalbard in Norway as fundamentally unjust in its objectives.
The Barcelona-based agriculture lobby, GRAIN, with branches in major developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, says a serious deficiency of the seed vault is that it deals basically with state and private-body depositors to the bank, thereby excluding the rights of poor farmers who cannot access these seeds.
GRAIN says the GSV's ex-situ storage system takes unique plant varieties away from farming communities that originally created, selected, protected and shared the seeds. Farmers, it holds, do not know how to access the scientific and institutional framework involved in setting up the system and are excluded.
"This system forgets that farmers are the world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders,'' GRAIN's Asia Programme Officer, Shalini Bhutani, who is based in New Delhi, told IPS.
Negotiating intellectual property and other rights over the seeds, originally conserved by farmers, thus becomes the business of governments and the seed industry itself, she says.
Decisions on the GSV will be taken by the Norwegian government, currently regarded as trustworthy, but without guarantee that its policies will change. It has a ten-year agreement with depositors that included clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change.
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