Cape Town — Crop seeds from around the world, including SA, are on their way to a remote island near the Arctic circle.

Once there, they will be stored deep below the ice in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. They should be safe and secure there for many years to come -- an insurance policy for many smaller seed collections around the world against war, disaster and human error.

These seeds are critical for global food supplies, being used by plant breeders to develop new strains of crops and fight diseases. Recent events have shown national collections are often vulnerable to political instability.

For example, ancient varieties of wheat and lentils were lost in Abu Ghraib in Iraq after the US invaded in 2003, and in Afghanistan it is thought the Taliban looted the national seed collection.

Typhoon Xangsane flooded the Philippines' national rice gene bank in 2006 and destroyed samples that had not been stored in waterproof packets.

"Unfortunately these kinds of national gene-bank horror stories are fairly commonplace," said Cary Fowler, the mastermind behind the "doomsday vault" and the executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will fund the operation of the vault.

The vault has been built by the Norwegian government under the mountains on Longearbyen Island on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, where the permafrost should keep the seeds cool if the refrigerator units fail.

The seeds will be kept at -18ºC and will hopefully survive for centuries to come.

One of the biggest contributors to this repository of agricultural heritage is the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research, which has sent 200000 duplicate samples from its gene banks around the world, which are home to 600000 varieties of plants.

Among the seeds sent from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture collection that it supports in Ibadan Nigeria, for example, are thousands of duplicates of unique varieties of domesticated and wild cowpeas (black-eyed beans) from SA and other African countries.

There are also samples of maize, soybean and Bambara groundnuts in the shipment.

The gene bank of the institute houses the world's biggest cowpea collection, with more than 15000 varieties from 88 countries around the world.

"The Svalbard gene bank is important because many countries cannot afford to maintain their own facilities," said the institute's gene bank manager, Dominique Dumet.

South African seeds had also been included in the samples sent to Svalbard by the Southern African Development Community's Plant Genetic Resources Centre in Zambia, said André Lezar, curator of the national plant genetic resource centre in Pretoria.

"They have sent South African maize, sorghum, pumpkin, watermelon, millet and Bambara groundnuts," he said.

Dumet warned the vault could not safeguard all food crops.

"The vault will only work for orthodox seeds like maize, wheat and sorghum. It will not work for seeds that cannot be dehydrated or are sensitive to the cold, such as avocados and cocoa," she said.

"And not all plants make seeds," she said, citing yams and cassava. "We still have lots of research to do."

The vault is due to open on February 26.