Unique fruit collection under threat
12 September 2010
The future of the world's oldest seed bank is hanging in the balance as the Russian government decides whether to allow property developers to bulldoze the site of a unique fruit collection to build houses.
Scientists around the world have called for the Russian government to step in to save the Pavlovsk Research Station, near St Petersburg, which has bred fruit varieties since 1926 when the Soviet Union was at its height.
Its collection is now the largest field genebank in Europe, containing more than 5,700 varieties of fruit, an estimated 90% of which exist nowhere else in the world. They include collections from overseas as well as those bred at the station, with hundreds of cultivars of apples, cherries and raspberries, as well as a number of edible honeysuckles.
The station bred leading strawberry varieties such as ‘Festivalnaya’, and has one of the best blackcurrant collections in the world: 60% of the varieties grown in Russia, the world’s largest producer of blackcurrants, were developed at Pavlovsk.
The future of the collection was looking bleak after a court ruled in favour of a property developer which has earmarked the site for housing, saying that since there were no clear property titles in the USSR at the time when it was set up, the Pavlovsk Research Station could not prove it owned the land on which the collection is growing.
The decision sparked an international campaign led by Global Crop Diversity, which runs the seed vault at Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. As a result, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has now intervened, postponing the sale until the government can fully assess the value of the collection.
‘In most countries the closure of an agricultural research station would never reach the desk of the President,’ said Cary Fowler, of Global Crop Diversity. ‘One simply has to believe that if leaders become aware of what’s being lost they’ll do the right thing.’
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