Peru Keeps Thousands of Potato Seeds in an Earthquake-Proof Vault
Written by
Kaleigh Rogers
Staff Writer
November 11, 2016 // 09:00 AM EST
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There’s a bank in Lima, Peru that holds contents so valuable, they’re hidden behind a thick metal door in an earthquake-proof vault. They’re not lost Inca gold or mounds of jewels, but thousands and thousands of potato seeds.
Seed banks serve as a kind of genetic Noah’s Ark for crops, keeping copies of as many different species of crops as possible to ensure food security in the future. These seeds are valuable because they are part of a global movement to preserve crop diversity.
“There’s a huge, long chain that goes from growing food to people eating it, and at the very beginning of that chain is conservation of diversity of crops,” said Colin Khoury, a researcher associate at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “In the past, that conservation wasn’t so necessary. But over the last 100 to 150 years, we’ve started to lose that diversity of the fields.”
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