One of Europe’s largest horticultural collections near Saint Petersburg, which had survived the ravages of World War II, is now threatened by real estate construction after a court ruling.
The arbitration court on Wednesday upheld the handover of land from the Pavlovsk agricultural station, which houses the collection, to a federal building agency which plans to construct a private housing estate there, the Vavilov Horticulture Institute said in its Web site.
“This ... means the destruction of the collection, which includes thousands of kinds of apple trees, cherry trees, wild strawberries, raspberries and other plants that were collected over the past century and of which 90 percent are unique,” it said.
Two plots of land, totaling 90 hectares were ceded to the federal agency last year.
More than 90 percent of the plants are found in no other research collection or seed bank. As it is predominantly a field collection, Pavlovsk cannot be moved. Experts estimate that even if another site were available nearby, it would take many years to relocate the plants and could prove fatal to them anyway.
In what appears Kafkaesque logic, the property developers argue that because the station contains a “priceless collection,” no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. In another nod to Kafka, the government’s federal fund of residential real estate development has argued that the collection was never registered and thus does not officially exist.
The institute in Saint Petersburg and its Pavlovsk station were founded in 1920s by the famed Russian genetics scientist Nikolai Vavilov.
Twelve Russian scientists famously chose to starve to death rather than eat the unique collection of wheat and corn seeds and plants they were protecting for humanity during the 900-day siege of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then known) during World War II.
Scientists have appealed to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, calling on him to “preserve the future of Russian agriculture.”
“It is a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in the country that invented the modern seed bank,” said Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
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