Those logistics are still being worked out, he said.Īfter all, one can expect a few unknowns when trying to prevent a doomsday scenario. Lainoff couldn’t say how many of the 116,484 varieties that are currently inside Svalbard’s vault at minus 18 Celsius will be withdrawn and moved to ICARDA’s facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, or when - or how - that would occur. They will replace what they had on ice in Norway with some of the newly generated seeds. With new seeds, they can resume the important research they’ve been doing for decades. ICARDA scientists need the seeds from Norway so they can plant and regenerate them at ICARDA facilities in Lebanon and Morocco. Three years later, with no sign of conditions in Syria improving, it had become time to cash in - or perhaps more appropriately, to defrost - its insurance policy. ICARDA’s gene bank in Aleppo, Syria, includes more than 135,000 varieties of wheat, fava bean, lentil and chickpea crops, as well as the world’s most valuable barley collection, according to Lainoff.īy 2012, Lainoff said, “it had become increasingly difficult to operate” in Aleppo, so ICARDA’s international staff - which had over the years successfully developed new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat - fled the country, leaving the center and its critical inventory behind. “Any day that facility could be hit,” he said. “We just don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Lainoff about the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, one of the Crop Trust’s 11 global seed banks. No seeds have ever been withdrawn, according to Lainoff, but Syria’s civil war has brought such chaos that it has the guardians of the so-called “Doomsday Vault” sounding the doomsday alarm. The vault is meant to be opened only in the event of a catastrophic event, like flooding or drought, that would threaten a crop with extinction, according to Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, one of the vault’s international stewards.
The Global Seed Vault, something of an agricultural Noah’s Ark, keeps a seed of just about every known crop in the world inside a frozen vault on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Nicknamed the doomsday vault, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is. 25, 2015) - The horror of Syria’s civil war is familiar to most, thanks to the ghastly images of death and destruction - and most recently, of fleeing refugees - that have played out across our screens.īut the conflict’s ugly effects have now reached far beyond the devastated streets of Syria and the crowded camps where its refugees huddle, and into the unlikeliest of places: deep below the frozen tundra of an Arctic island. The first withdrawal from the Global Seed Vault was made by researchers whose collection was halted due to the Syrian War. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. The vault holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. "The fact that the seed collection destroyed in Syria during the civil war has been systematically rebuilt shows that the vault functions as an insurance for current and future food supply and for local food security," said Norwegian International Development Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim.
ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 20 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples. On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon deposited seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen Island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world. A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world's crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes received new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organization that made a withdrawal from the facility, reported Agence France Press.
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