Tens of thousands of seed samples that were part of Ukraine’s national seed collection have been destroyed by a Russian bomb attack on the city of Kharkiv, according to a video posted on YouTube on 14 May. The collection was the 10th largest in the world and supplied seeds to breeders in many countries, including Russia.
“Almost everything turned into ashes,” said Sergey Avramenko at in the video, which is no longer available. “There were varieties that were hundreds of years old and cannot be restored.”
The video shows that the contents of a large room containing bags and packets of seeds have been almost completely destroyed. Only a handful of seeds weren’t burnt black and these probably won’t germinate, said Avramenko.
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At one point in the video, he showed a puddle of melted metal on the floor. That metal was aluminium, according to Avramenko, meaning temperatures in the room reached at least 660°C.
“In these rooms, there was no military or territorial defence, there was only a scientific institution,” he said.
Seed banks, also called gene banks, preserve the genetic diversity of plants as a repository for breeders. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine during the second world war, they preserved the seed collection because they recognised its importance, said Avramenko in the video. But Russia deliberately targeted the institute, he claimed.
Before the war, the in Kharkiv stored more than 150,000 samples of over 1800 plant species from around the world. However, it appears most of these haven’t been destroyed.
“Despite recent media reports, our current understanding from the management of the gene bank is that the main seed collections are still safe and that the damage we are seeing online is mainly to an agricultural research station,” , head of the Crop Trust in Bonn, Germany, told 51¶ŻÂţ.
“Nevertheless, the main collections of the national gene bank system are at high risk – as are the dedicated staff who maintain them. We are relieved to hear that no lives have been lost among the staff. We are doing what we can to help them,” he says.
“The agricultural heritage stored in the Ukrainian gene bank system is of inestimable value not just to Ukrainian agriculture, but to the whole world,” says Schmitz.
Seeds can’t be stored indefinitely in seed banks. They have to be resown every few years, with fresh seeds collected and stored, which is why maintaining them is expensive.
According to Avramenko, the seeds in the room were those sent out be resown in spring. In another room, he showed that the bicycles staff use to take the seeds to fields had been destroyed. Winter crops were already sown, he says.
In 2011, 4 per cent of Ukraine’s seed collection was duplicated and backed up in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway with the help of the Crop Trust, says Schmitz, and some varieties are also found in seed banks elsewhere.
But the vast majority remains at risk. “So if anything is lost, it will be lost forever,” he says.
“Any loss of the collections will have a negative impact on prospects for global food and nutritional security. Every seed sample conserved in a gene bank represents a unique additional option available to breeders, researchers and farmers in the fight against climate change and food insecurity, and we cannot afford to lose any of them,” says Schmitz.
“We are unfortunately facing an unprecedented loss of agricultural biodiversity in farmers’ fields. We must not lose crop diversity from gene banks too,” he says.
The Plant Production Institute in Kharkiv didn’t respond to a request for comment.
