13,000 seed samples from 21 gene banks were deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week.

This was announced by the Norwegian Government in a press release.

The seed samples include essential varieties of sorghum and pearl millet from Sudan’s crop genebank, a collection nearly destroyed during the country’s civil war, so-called “velvet beans” from Malawi that support both sustainable agriculture and traditional medicine, critical food crops from a Philippine genebank that’s been ravaged by typhoons and fires and a major collection of more than 3,000 varieties of rice, beans and maize from Brazil.