LONGYEARBYEN (Norway), Feb 26: A vault carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world’s most important seeds was inaugurated on Tuesday providing a Noah’s Ark of food crops in the event of a global catastrophe.

“This is a frozen garden of Eden,” said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the opening ceremony.

Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the new seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world today.

In sub-freezing temperatures, Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg inaugurated the vault by symbolically depositing a box containing grains of rice in one of its three spacious cold chambers.

“The world is a bit safer today,” Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind, told AFP.

“Now we’re able to safely store a tremendous amount of vulnerable and precious seeds. This is the first time we’ve been able to say that. So it’s not bad for a day’s work,” he said after an opening ceremony that featured a traditional Sami chant mixed with African-inspired jazz and child choirs. Norway has assumed the entire $8.9 million charge for building the so-called “doomsday vault” in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, just some 1,000km from the North Pole.

“We’re pretty far away from the dangers of the world here,” Fowler said.

Even if the freezer system fails, the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above minus 3.5 degrees Celsius. Contributions from the more than 1,300 other seed banks worldwide are expected at a later date.—AFP