Ukraine's giant seed bank at risk of being lost as war rages

LONDON - In underground vaults near Ukraine's battlefields, the genetic code for nearly 2,000 crops is in danger of being permanently destroyed.

Reuters could not determine the cause of the damage and Crop Trust said only that the research facility had been hit, but declined to give further detail, citing security reasons. The director of the seed bank could not be reached, Ukraine's academy of science declined to comment and Russia's defence ministry did not immediately reply to request for commment on the damage.

At the same time, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the world's third and fourth largest grain exporters respectively, has added to food price inflation and the danger of food scarcity, with protests breaking out in developing countries that normally benefit from Ukraine's grain. In total, Svalbard preserves more than a million seed samples in a vault built in an Arctic mountainside.The German-based Crop Trust, which is the only international organisation whose sole purpose is to safeguard crop diversity, has made funds available to Ukraine to copy seeds, but security and logistics issues linked to the war and natural cycles mean it is difficult to speed up the process.

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