Portugal Stores 334 More Bean and Maize Samples in the Svalbard Seed Vault, Its Fifth Arctic Deposit
Tuesday's consignment of common bean, cowpea and maize brings the Portuguese samples kept in Norway's "doomsday vault" to 1,861, as safety copies of the national collections.
Portugal will place 334 more samples of its own crop seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Tuesday, the Arctic store in Norway that keeps back-up copies of the world's seed collections. The deposit raises the number of Portuguese samples held there to 1,861.
The Ministério da Agricultura e Mar (Ministry of Agriculture and Sea) said in a statement, reported by Lusa, that it will be Portugal's fifth official deposit at the vault, often called the "doomsday vault". The Secretary of State for Agriculture, João Moura, will attend.
Beans and maize this time
The new consignment is made up of 303 accessions of common bean, 18 of cowpea (feijão-frade, the black-eyed pea) and 13 of maize. An accession is a distinct sample held in a genebank, usually a single local variety or population collected in one place.
Portugal made its first deposit in 2018 and followed it with others in 2020, 2023 and 2025. Together those four consignments added up to 1,527 accessions of crops including maize, barley, rye, wheat, common bean and cowpea. Tuesday's 334 bring the total to 1,861.
At home, the collections are kept by the Instituto Nacional de Investigação Agrária e Veterinária (INIAV, National Institute for Agrarian and Veterinary Research) and the Banco Português de Germoplasma Vegetal (BPGV, Portuguese Plant Germplasm Bank). The samples sent to Svalbard are safety copies of those national collections.
Why a vault in the Arctic
The vault opened in 2008. It lets genebanks from different countries store copies of their collections so that farm varieties are not lost for good if a natural disaster, an armed conflict or a technical failure destroys the originals. It is run by a partnership between Norway's Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (NordGen) and the Crop Trust, an international fund for crop diversity. In June it passed 1.4 million stored samples.
According to the Norwegian authorities, more than 20 genebanks from different countries will take part in Tuesday's ceremony, among them institutions from Ukraine, Lebanon and South Africa.
Portugal has sat on the vault's advisory council since 2023. INIAV also takes part in the 100 Year Seed Longevity Experiment, an international study that will test how well seeds survive in storage over a century. Portugal is a party to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, under the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and works with the Crop Trust and the European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources.
