By Tony Carnie
South Africa has stored away 10 percent of its wild plants in seed banks as part of a global insurance policy to safeguard the world's wild plants from extinction.
The project is led by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, with support from plant specialist groups around the world, such as the SA National Biodiversity Institute.
The banking of more than 2 500 wild South African plants, including 250 of the country's most threatened species, coincided with a ceremony at Kew last week to celebrate banking the world's 24 200th wild plant, a pink wild banana from China.
Royal Botanic Gardens spokesman Dr Paul Smith said that banking of the banana species also marked the attainment of the 10 percent conservation target set almost 10 years ago in a project known as the Kew Millennium Seed Bank.
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"Banking 10 percent of the world's plant species on time and under budget is a major achievement and we have very good reason to be proud," he said.
But now that the 10 percent mark has been reached, a new target has been set to bank 25 percent of the world's plant species before 2020.
"The Millennium Seed Bank is not a doomsday vault where seeds are stored under lock and key," said Smith.
"Our mission is to use these seeds to support conservation and improve people's lives. Most of the seed collections are available for research and over one third have a known use to people."
South Africa started to bank wild plants in 1996 and there are now nearly 2 500 different types in two seed banks, one at an Agriculture Ministry centre in Roodeplaat, near Pretoria, and the other at Wakehurst Place in England.
The Wakehurst estate is the largest wild seed bank in the world, housing more than 3.5 billion seeds from nearly 25 000 plant types.
As part of the new 25 percent conservation target, the Royal Botanic Gardens has also launched a project called "Adopt a Seed. Save a Species."
Individual donors are being asked to contribute R300 to adopt a seed or R24 000 to "save" an entire species.
For more information, visit www.kew.org/adoptaseed
This news was supplied exclusively to iol.co.za by the news desk at our sister title The Mercury. For more about this story, carry on watching iol.co.za or click here to subscribe to the digital or print edition of the newspaper.
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