A Russian court refused to interfere with a Russian housing agency’s plans to develop new housing units on the site of a seed bank containing more than five thousand varieties of fruits and ornamental plants.
Cary Fowler is quoted in an article in The Guardian as saying “It is a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in the country that invented the modern seed bank. Russia taught the world about the importance of crop collections for the future of agriculture. A decision to destroy Pavlovsk would forever tarnish a cause that generations of Russian plant scientists have lived and, quite literally, died, to protect.”
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