Syrian Seedbank

Syrian seedbank wins award for continuing work despite civil war

Fiona Harvey

Thursday 19 March 2015 10.14 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 24 March 201507.01 EDT

Syrian scientists who risked their lives preserving the region’s ancient farming heritage with nearly 150,000 seed samples are presented Gregor Mendel award in Berlin.

The fields around Aleppo have sustained humanity for tens of thousands of years. Blood-torn now, they were among the first to produce wheat, barley and the crops that made this area part of the “fertile crescent” that Western civilization sprang from.

There may be little sign of that left today, amid Syria’s bloody civil war, but the few remaining strands of the region’s farming heritage have been pulled together by a small group of scientists, whose achievement has just been recognised.

The Gregor Mendel award was presented on Thursday to the scientists of Syria’s Icarda genebank at a ceremony in Berlin, for their achievement in preserving nearly 150,000 seed samples. Most of the samples will be held in safety at a special facility in Svalbard, in the far north of Norway, built for banking seeds in optimum conditions.

 Icarda’s genebank team in Aleppo. Thanks to their efforts, almost 100% of the collection is safely duplicated outside Syria and 80% in Svalbard, Norway.

Mahmoud Solh, director general of Icarda, said the bank represented the “genetic wealth” of humanity, with plants from some 128 countries. “The role of gene collection in preserving crop biodiversity and ensuring future food supply has become particularly important as climate change poses a serious threat to crops and food security in the developing world,” he said.

The scientists who have risked their lives in the midst of civil war in Syria to save a global good for humanity are part of a millenia-old culture. Syria was part of what we now know as the “fertile crescent” in the Middle East, where humanity first learned agriculture, revolutionising life by taking our ancestors from a hunting and gathering existence to a settled mode of farming that eventually led to modern civilisation.

The products of the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago are still in use today, but their origins are under threat. New diseases, such as the devastating wheat stem rust, which was virtually unknown a decade ago but could now threaten bread supplies across swathes of the Middle East and Africa, are spreading, fuelled by the globalisation of agriculture and the increasing focus on a smaller number of high-yielding crop varieties.

Seeds of the crops that have sustained us for millennia – of wheat, rice, maize and beans – are vital to modern science, because of the genetic traits that they contain, and they could prove essential to countering emerging diseases and to improving crop yields to feed the anticipated 10 billion people who will soon be sharing the planet.

The genes that our ancestors so valued as to spend generations breeding them into viable staple crops are preserved in the crop varieties we have today. But as global “agribusiness” focuses on an increasingly narrow range of varieties, preferring “monoculture” as more efficient, the genetic pool becomes more shallow. Older, less apparently valuable, varieties are given up, and with them the useful genes they might contain, in order to maximise a few key qualities.

But the danger is that as farmers “breed in” genes that appear desirable, they also “breed out” variants that could hold the key to other genetic traits whose worth is still unknown, or undervalued. When new diseases break out – as they have done – these older varieties could become the saviour, and that is why a small but dedicated cadre of scientists around the world have been fighting – and sometimes risking their lives – to preserve this overlooked genetic inheritance.