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Monday, December 15, 2008
Seed vault may wither due to economy
ARDINGLY, England (AP) — The underground bunker can block nuclear fallout, withstand a direct hit by a jetliner, and is cooled to a deathly chill.
The ultramodern facility in the tranquil English countryside looks like a perfect lab for a James Bond villain, but it doesn’t hide anything sinister. The only thing kept here are seeds, lots of them — more than a billion, in fact.
Scientists say this is the world’s most diverse seed bank, but its keepers worry that the global financial crisis could cut its government and corporate funding and cause the seed gathering to wither at the end of next year, well short of its goal.
“This is the world’s biodiversity hot spot,” said Paul Smith, director of the Millennium Seed Bank Project, standing outside two room-size vaults filled with precious seeds which are kept at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit to slow their metabolism.
“That’s important for mankind. But if the funding situation doesn’t improve, we’ll have to stop collecting.”
He has already seen a tightening of philanthropic budgets in recent months that is affecting the seed bank’s future. “We have not raised the kind of money we had hoped to at this point,” Smith said.
There are more than 1,000 seed banks — including a newly opened, unmanned “doomsday” facility in the Arctic wastes of Norway that will ultimately house more than 1 billion crop seeds. But the one at Wakehurst Place, about 30 miles south of London, says it’s the only global facility of its kind, unique for its focus on wild species, not just crops.
It says it aims to store a quarter of the world’s species by 2020, and could eventually house half of them. It currently has 25,000 species and 1.5 billion seeds.
The seed bank’s scientists gauge the total number of plant species at 300,000, which represents a middle figure in the widely varying, constantly changing, global estimate. It doesn’t just take in seeds — it sends them out. Millennium Bank seeds are being used in Australia to figure out what plants can grow in salty reclaimed land, and in Pakistan and Egypt to find plants that can withstand drought and slow desert encroachment.
The bank is helping to restore tall prairie grass in the United States and a tropical forest in Madagascar.
Saving the world’s seeds does not come cheap.
At the Millennium Seed Bank, it costs about $3,000 per species to ship in the seeds, meticulously clean them, X-ray them for insect damage and freeze them for possible future use as medicine, a commercial product, or a reviver of a plant that has gone extinct.
It is a global effort: The bank has more than 120 different partners in some 50 countries where seeds are collected and stored. In many cases, seeds are kept both in their native countries and here as a backup.
Some countries, Brazil for instance, are unwilling to send precious seeds overseas, so they are kept in at least two seed banks inside the country, their standards monitored by Millennium Seed Bank experts.
The project, under the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, started in 2000 with 72 million pounds, then about $110 million, in funding from Britain’s national lottery and governmental, corporate and individual sponsors.
Smith said the seed bank needs to raise about 10 million pounds ($15 million) a year for the next decade.
The futuristic facility, with its low-slung steel and glass structure over the vaults, is seen by scientists as an insurance policy against nature and human folly. It is a quiet place, where young scientists in white smocks spend hours cleaning seeds by hand, using microscopes, scalpels, forceps, and tiny brushes. The largest is the double coconut seed, almost as big as two coconuts; smallest is the Venus looking glass — with more than a million seeds fitting into a small canister.
Before depositing the seeds in the vaults, lab workers don floor-length parkas.
Even then, the temperature is so low that bodies start losing core heat in 15 minutes. So elaborate safety systems are in place in case anyone is trapped in a vault; an AP photographer inadvertently tripped a series of ringing alarms when he left the vault while a worker remained inside.
Scientists call the Millennium effort invaluable as climate change accelerates.
“The potential value of this project is almost unfathomable,” said David Astley, head of the Genetics Resources Unit at the University of Warwick in England, who corroborated the Millennium Projects claim to be the world’s most diverse seed bank.
“If you look at the way the world is going, it’s inevitable that genetic material will be lost,” said Astley, who is not connected to the project. “The big fear is that, if global warming comes sooner rather than later, it may be too late to conserve the material.”
Scientists here are also developing new ways to germinate endangered species, including some like the South African faucaria that are down to a single population of plants in the wild.
“We don’t know that they are useful for anything,” Smith said, “but we don’t know that they aren’t useful either.”
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Troops kill 40 in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan official says a joint Afghan-NATO operation in the country’s south has killed 40 Taliban militants.
Helmand governor spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said today that the operation in the Nad Ali and Murja regions of Helmand began last Thursday and is still ongoing. He says that 40 militants have been killed. The dead include Mullah Salim, the head of the Taliban’s leadership council in those regions.
Lt. Cmdr. James Gater confirmed that a joint operation in Helmand is under way. He said he had no casualty figures he could release.
Gater is a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force
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Bush takes farewell tour of war zones
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — President George W. Bush wrapped up a whirlwind trip to two war zones today that in many ways was a victory lap without a clear victory. A signature event occurred when an Iraqi reporter hurled two shoes at Bush, an incident the president later described as “a bizarre moment.”
Bush visited the Iraqi capital just 37 days before he hands the war off to his successor, Barack Obama, who has pledged to end it. The president wanted to highlight a drop in violence and to celebrate a recent U.S.-Iraq security agreement, which calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.
“The war is not over,” Bush said, but “it is decisively on its way to being won.”
Bush then traveled to Afghanistan where he spoke to U.S. soldiers and Marines at a hangar on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base. The rally for over a thousand military personnel took place in the dark, cold pre-dawn hours. Bush was greeted by loud cheers from the troops.
“Afghanistan is a dramatically different country than it was eight years ago,” he said. “We are making hopeful gains.”
But the president’s message on progress in the region was having trouble competing with the videotaped image of the angry Iraqi who hurled his shoes at Bush in a near-miss, shouting in Arabic, “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” The reporter was later identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt.
In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam with their shoes after U.S. Marines toppled it to the ground following the 2003 invasion.
“I’m not insulted. I don’t hold it against the government,” Bush said later in an interview with ABC News. “The guy wanted to get on TV and he did. I don’t know what his beef is, but whatever it is, I’m sure someone will hear it.”
Reaction in Iraq was swift but mixed, with some condemning the act and others applauding it. Television news stations throughout Iraq repeatedly showed footage of the incident, and newspapers carried headline stories.
In Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for protests against President Bush and demanded the release of the reporter, who was jailed after throwing his shoes. Thousands took to the streets today, chanting, “Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head.”
Talking to a small group of reporters after the incident, Bush said, “I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.” He told the reporters that “you were more concerned than I was. I was watching your faces.”
“I’m pretty good at ducking, as most of you know,” Bush joked, adding quickly that “I’m talking about ducking your questions.”
On a more serious note, he said, “I mean, it was just a bizarre moment, but I’ve had other bizarre moments in the presidency. I remember when Hu Jintao was here. Remember? We had the big event? He’s speaking, and all of a sudden I hear this noise — had no earthly idea what was taking place, but it was the Falun Gong woman screaming at the top of her lungs (near the ceremony on the White House lawn). It was kind of an odd moment.”
The Iraqi government condemned the act and demanded an on-air apology from Al-Baghdadia television, the Iraqi-owned station that employs Muntadar al-Zeidi. The reporter was taken into custody and reportedly was being held for questioning by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s guards and is being tested for alcohol and drugs.
Other Arab journalists and commentators, fed up with U.S. policy in the Middle East and Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam, echoed al-Zeidi’s sentiments Monday. Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the influential London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, wrote on the newspaper’s Web site that the incident was “a proper goodbye for a war criminal.”
After word spread of the shoe attack, Afghan reporters had gathered at the presidential palace in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, before a news conference by Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Some of the reporters — a collegial bunch that sees one another several times a week — egged on one of their colleagues, jokingly trying to pressure the television reporter into taking off his shoe and hurling it once the U.S. president arrived. He did not.
Karzai’s deputy spokesman, Saimak Herwai, told Afghan reporters that they had to address Bush as “His Excellency,” an honorary title not typically used with U.S. presidents. The request was followed by some, not by others.
Bush then took a helicopter ride to Kabul to meet with Karzai.
After their meeting, Bush said he told Karzai: “You can count on the United States. Just like you’ve been able to count on this administration, you’ll be able to count on the next administration as well.”
The mixed reactions to Bush in both countries emphasized the uncertain situations Bush is leaving behind in the region.
In Iraq, nearly 150,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, protecting the fragile democracy.
More than 4,209 members of the U.S. military have died and $576 billion has been spent since the war began five years and nine months ago. The Bush administration and even White House critics credit last year’s military buildup with the security gains in Iraq.
Last month, attacks fell to the lowest monthly level since the war began in 2003.
In Afghanistan, there are about 31,000 U.S. troops and commanders have called for up to 20,000 more. The fight is especially difficult in southern Afghanistan, a stronghold of the Taliban where violence has risen sharply this year.
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