The ongoing armed conflict in Syria has forced scientists—for the first time ever—to withdraw seeds from the Arctic seed vault that is tasked with safeguarding the world’s food supply, the Crop Trust which oversees the repository confirmed Monday.
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Buried in the remote Svalbard peninsula in the Arctic and designed to withstand rising sea levels, the vault was established eight years ago by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and NordGen. It preserves roughly 860,000 samples from gene banks around the world—to fortify international supply in case of catastrophe.
The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)—an important gene bank based in Aleppo, Syria—was one of many from around the world that sent seeds to the Arctic for safe keeping.
“The seeds in ICARDA’s care are a globally important collection with 65 percent as unique landraces and wild relatives of cereals, legumes and forages collected from regions such as the ‘Fertile Crescent’ in Western Asia, the Abyssinian highlands in Ethiopia and the Nile Valley where earliest known crop domestication practices were recorded in civilization,” the Crop Trust explained in a statement released Monday.
However, due to ongoing war and conflict, research at the Aleppo facility has been destabilized.
“ICARDA managed to move its headquarters from Syria in the early days of the war, while some of its workers remained at the gene bank in Aleppo in an attempt to save the collection,” the Crop Trust said last month. “The organization managed to duplicate 80 percent of its collection in Svalbard as of March this year, where the seeds were safely stored along with others from around the world.”
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