| Seed bank for the world threatened by financial crisis | |
 A seed bank set up in Ardingly, England, to try and collect every type of plant in the world is under threat by the financial crisis that has hit. The Millennium Seed Project is being run by Kew Gardens, one of the world's oldest botanical gardens, and is currently 50% funded by the National Lottery. The rest of the funding is from corporate funding.
However, with the 2010 London Olympics effecting the Lottery funding and the economic downturn effecting businesses, funding is slowly becoming harder to come by. The seed bank is aiming to store 300,000 plant species which should help protect them as they are a vital source of food and medicine for the future. The project needs £10 million per year to keep running, an average of £2000 per seed to be collected and stored. The aim of 10% of the total seeds needed to be collected is set for 2010 which it looks like will be achieved as long as the funding doesn’t dry up. There are 1,400 other seed banks around the world, these store only 0.6% of the worlds plants, the Millennium Project is aiming to collect the remaining 99.4%. "We would say that this is an exceptional bank and that the assets within it, the capital that we have built up, is unique and we can't squander this," Smith told Reuters Television during a tour of the facility south of London. The Millennium Seed Bank Project is the only project of its kind in the world which aims to collect and conserve all the planet's wild plant diversity, Smith said. Forest clearing has a large impact on the plant species found, around 13 million hectares of forest is cleared every year. This then effects the availability of plants that are used in food and medicine. Seeds are sent to the project from around the world, they are catalogued, tested, experimented on or separated from husks, cleaned and dried for storage underground at -20 degrees in a vault that can withstand a nuclear accident. A third of the planet's plants are categorized as threatened with extinction, which could have dramatic effects on human life, trade and the environment, Smith said.
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