Spirit of Islam, April 2013

GLOBAL warming is regarded as the greatest problem besetting mankind at the present time. Scientific investigations have revealed that the earth’s life support system dependent upon the balance of nature is fast falling apart. It is greatly feared that soon a time will come when nothing will be left on earth to ensure the survival of life. To mitigate the horrors of this forecast period, many strategies are being planned in advance. Since it is feared that—as a result of climatic change—all food crops may be wiped off the face of the earth, one of the strategies has been to build a vault for the safe storage of the different varieties of seeds in Norway. It will then be possible to cultivate crops at a later stage to fulfil the world’s food requirements. Soon, a time will come when nothing will be left on earth to ensure the survival of life. The Global Seed Vault was established in 2008. On its inauguration, important international personalities were present, including the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Baroso, as well as Wangari Matai, the Nobel Prize winning environmentalist, besides others. The event was widely reported with one report titled: ‘Doomsday Vault Comes to Life’. That is to say that the vault is a safe storage ready for doomsday. The report also tells us that out of fear of general crop devastation, the global seed vault has been built on a mountain on the island of Svalbard in Norway, 1000 km from the North Pole. Three spacious cold chambers—provide storage for some seven hundred and fifty thousand samples of seeds from all over the world. A Global Crop Diversity Trust has been formed to oversee this venture. One media report calls this storage facility, ‘’a Noah’s Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe, an Arctic ‘Doomsday Vault’ filled with samples of vital seeds.” It would be more appropriate to compare the food storage vault built in Norway atop a mountain not with Noah’s Ark but with the fate of Noah’s son Kan’an. GLOBAL WARMING OR WARNING