Have you ever heard of the Svalbard global seed vault? It is the storage facility on the Svalbard Islands, in Norway, where almost one million seeds from around the world are kept to protect them from potential catastrophes or disasters, more or less natural. Until 2012, this place — the most important seed bank on Earth — was led by Cary Fowler, now a senior adviser to the Global crop diversity trust, the foundation that, together with the Norwegian government, manages the facility.

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On the occasion of the International Day for Biological Diversity, celebrated on 22 May, the documentary Seeds of Time, directed by Sandy Mcleod, is released in cinemas around the world and online. Fowler is the protagonist of this story, which seeks to make the viewer understand how the future of agriculture — and of all of us — is under threat due to climate change and the monocultures that are increasingly widespread and imposed by multinationals, killing agricultural biodiversity and reducing species to a handful of varieties.

There is little time left to protect food and future generations. There is little time left to prevent food scarcity from sparking popular uprisings and further famines. There is little time left to save farming families and indigenous communities — such as those in Peru — grappling with more than 1,500 varieties of potato at risk of extinction. A story and a journey that Fowler has decided to tell in an attempt to save the resource without which there would be no life: seeds.