Regions prone to natural disaster, like the Eastern and Northern Caribbean, often require specific heirloom seeds cultivated over many decades, sometimes centuries, to get proper crop yield with the extremes of some of the wet/dry cycles.
What I've understood from first-hand accounts in places like USVI and Dominica is that with Maria/Irma most of the heirlooms got lost, and they were replaced by UN CERF, with non-heirlooms.
I don't know if the centralized seed repository is evil or not, but what I do perceive is that the marginalized, most disaster-prone areas, need more than just some vault of generic tomato and kale seeds in Svalbard.
There was a company making portable seed vaults (basically shipping container sized little labs for cleaning, preserving, and storing seeds). Looks like they pivoted away from this lately, but I thought it was a really cool concept.
Regions prone to natural disaster, like the Eastern and Northern Caribbean, often require specific heirloom seeds cultivated over many decades, sometimes centuries, to get proper crop yield with the extremes of some of the wet/dry cycles.
What I've understood from first-hand accounts in places like USVI and Dominica is that with Maria/Irma most of the heirlooms got lost, and they were replaced by UN CERF, with non-heirlooms.
I don't know if the centralized seed repository is evil or not, but what I do perceive is that the marginalized, most disaster-prone areas, need more than just some vault of generic tomato and kale seeds in Svalbard.