Career Opportunities in the Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape: Seed Banker

It is India’s doomsday vault. If the land lies cracked and barren waiting for the rain, if the sea swallows coastal paddy fields, if plagues of pests wipe crops out of existence, India has an insurance policy – a set of seeds carefully preserved in permafrost, ready to be restored, that can be cultivated and sown to feed its people.

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Chang-La, opened last December, now holds 5,000 seeds from the Ministry of Defence, prioritised for qualities such yield or resistance to temperature, pests or humidity. But its total capacity is 10 times that and, says Selvamurthy, government departments, research organisations and more are welcome to store useful and viable seeds for free. Their qualities will be digitally indexed and available through open access software to further science globally.

This facility aims to rival that at Svalbard in Norway, which can hold up to 3 million seed varieties, by opening up its vaults to the international community. For that to happen, India will have to install a cooling system for the 15 days a year when the temperatures peak to -4 degrees. So even if something happens at high latitude in Norway, there will be a back up at high altitude in India.

At least someone's doing it...

Of course, if climate change or other forms of ecological collapse do manage to eviscerate our food supply chain, Norway and India alone will not be able to save us. This is where a few independent, well-prepared, forward-thinking individuals and communes could potentially make a killing in the seed market. Seed saving is a practice that just makes good sense anyway, for anyone who has a good amount of storage space and a healthy interest in food security; and if you manage to build yourself up a large, diverse collection, renewed and expanded on a regular basis, you may find yourself the go-to supplier when the genemod monocultures that are taking over our food system disappear overnight. The drawbacks: building a workable seed bank requires complete financial and agricultural independence and a commitment to remain in the same place for several decades at a time, which is why I'm unlikely to participate; so I'm throwing this open to any other collapsatarians out there with the means and the motivation. All I ask is that you let me know, so that if I happen to be in your area when the big crash comes I can stop by to request a loan.