WORLD'S THIRD BIGGEST SEED GENE BANK ESTABLISHED IN ANKARA

Turkey's Agriculture & Rural Affairs Minister Mehmet Mehdi Eker laid the foundation of the center, which is the biggest after China and the United States.
"Seed gene banks are food assurances of humanity. This will be the third biggest gene bank of the world and is expected to be concluded in December, 2009. Turkey's potential in agriculture will be activated with the bank," Eker said.
Eker said his ministry was in an effort to solve delayed problems of agriculture with short, medium and long term projects.
Eker said biological diversity and genetic resources rapidly lessened because negative elements caused by industrialization and urbanization, "this is alarming. 75 percent of the genetic diversity of the past century got lost now," he noted.
Underlining that Turkey was rich of biological diversity and endemic plant species, Eker said 3,905 of the 12,000 endemic plant species were in Turkey, "Turkey should be aware of this richness and preserve this for the whole humanity."
"The bank will contain genes of 250 thousand plant species," Eker said, noting that, "seeds collected within and outside the country can be protected here. Scientists will be able to use them as material in their experiments," he said.
The world's largest seed bank is managed by the Agriculture Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. It holds more than 460,000 seed samples and has the capacity to store up to 1 million sample. Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.