“We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,” said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a
nonprofit group that runs the vault. “Everyone was saying, why didn’t anyone prepare for a hurricane before? We knew it was going to happen. “Well,
we are losing biodiversity every day — it’s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It’s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.”

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