Seeds of hope deep inside a mountain
Nothing in the Nigerian cowpea seed's millennia of breeding will have prepared it for this. After growing in the African heat, it was picked, mixed with other cowpea seeds, packaged and dried. Then, at the same time as thousands of other seeds from across the globe, it was sealed in a DHL parcel.
When it emerges this week, this African seed will be nearly 8046km away in the endless dark of a Norwegian winter. It will be wheeled into the permafrost beside 14,000 seeds from Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Serbia among others, to become part of the largest single addition to the world's greatest agricultural insurance policy: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
A seed holds the memory of millions of years of evolution and, often, selective breeding. That history, scientists fear, is fragile. If the wild relative of a crop is lost, so are all the adaptations it has gained to cope with heat, cold, drought and wet. This is why seed banks exist, to store and maintain this genetic legacy. But they too are fragile.
Beri Bonglim, of the Crop Trust, said: "These national seed banks are threatened, by man-made disasters like wars or natural disasters like earthquakes."
In some cases it can be as simple as the refrigeration being temporarily switched off because of lack of money.
So in 2008 the Svalbard seed bank was opened inside a mountain where war is less of an issue. The permafrost keeps temperatures under zero and the site's own refrigeration lowers them further.
Over the past decade, a vast underground vault has been filled with seeds from every continent and climate. Sitting beside each other in plastic boxes, rice from southeast Asia shares shelf space with South American maize. There is also coffee, cocoa, dwarf wheat, 78 species of alfalfa, 85 of acacia, 52 wheats, 49 barleys, 25 kinds of rice, 48 blackberry species and 32 blueberries. They are catalogued and stored, ready to be replanted if necessary.
Not many people have seen inside the bank, which has 1.3 million seed varieties. Bonglim is one of the few who has visited. "It was a very emotional moment – just knowing the diversity of the world's genetic resources is in this room."