FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

The Syrian War Has Prompted the First Withdrawal from the 'Doomsday' Seed Vault

After the war broke out in Syria in 2011, a vital seed bank sent its collection to be stored deep inside an Arctic mountain vault. But now it wants its seeds back.
Photos courtesy of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Doomsday may be on its way a little sooner than expected.

The unceasing Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and accelerated the rise of ISIS. The conflict has also seen the damage—and in some cases, the destruction—of hundreds of historic sites, monuments, and buildings, irreparably harming Syria's cultural patrimony.

Far less visible is the damage done to the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), a seed vault south of Aleppo. It was one of 11 international genebanks that closely guarded samples of some of the world's most important crops, keeping over 100,000 seed packets of ancient strains of wheat, durum, lentils, barley, and fava beans in cold storage. It also provided seeds to farmers from dry areas around the Middle East.

Advertisement

READ: The Arctic Doomsday Vault Might Save Our Food Future

Fearing a power loss or other catastrophe as a result of the war, the Center began moving its collection to other seed banks around the world shortly after the war broke out in Syria in 2011. In March, the last of those seeds ended up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a 1,000-square-meter facility carved into a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 800 miles from the North Pole.

At the time, Svalbard's coordinator Ola Westengen noted, "The current situation for the globally important genebank in Syria precisely illustrates the purpose of the seed vault—to be a safety net for valuable seed collections." Svalbard has been nicknamed "the Doomsday Vault" because it's supposed to be the backup to the backup. It's supposed to save our seeds from nuclear war and disease when other banks fail.

But now the Middle East is making a withdrawal.

According to Reuters, ICARDA has asked for 130 of the 325 boxes of seeds it sent to Svalbard to be returned. This would be the first time that Svalbard has ever processed a withdrawal.

Although ICARDA's home base in Aleppo has been maintained with a skeleton crew since it began winding down in 2012, it is not fully functional nor able to maintain its past role. Instead, ICARDA has moved much of its operations to Beirut, and now it wants to resume its work distributing potentially beneficial seeds to areas of the Middle East. Many of its seeds stored at Svalbard—including wheat, barley, and grasses—are resistant to drought, which ICARDA believes could be a boon to countries currently wracked by climate change.

The more than 100,000 seeds will be sent to ICARDA once the proper paperwork has been filed, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry told Reuters.