Tucked against the mountains that form the border between Lebanon and Syria, a new facility is being prepared to house and replace the agricultural inheritance of the region after fighting left major seed bank in Aleppo inaccessible. Once housed in a sprawling 1,000-hectare facility in Syria, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Area is now based just outside the small Bekaa Valley town of Terbol.
Informal tented settlements dot the rough road leading to the complex – a compound scattered with buildings next to 50 hectares of agricultural land.
“In Syria, if you ask anyone about ICARDA they know what it is. [But] there are people who work in agriculture in Lebanon who haven’t heard of it,” Mariana Yazbek, one of the four scientists based at the Terbol facility, told The Daily Star.
That has changed since instability from the Syrian civil war forced the group to abandon the Aleppo center in 2012. ICARDA relocated to Morocco and Lebanon and needed to replace the precious store of seeds left behind.
To do this, they made the first withdrawal from the Norwegian “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault, located on the icy archipelago of Svalbard. The bank has been acting as an insurance policy for the worldwide network of 1,750 seed banks since it was completed in 2008, and now houses some 4,000 species of seeds.
Though there were other copies of ICARDA’s stock dotted across seven or eight other gene banks, there were specific benefits to the Svalbard bank. “When Svalbard opened, it was decided to send another [complete] copy of everything there. When we wanted to reconstruct the collection [lost in Aleppo] we had two options, either go and collect all our first duplicates from all the other seed banks, some of that material is 20-30 years old, or to go to Svalbard because everything is there,” Yazbek explained.
Dr. Hasan Machlab, the country director in Lebanon, who spent several years at the important Aleppo site, recalled how they moved staff, equipment and 100 of the center’s 300-strong fleet of cars when they had to abandon the facility in 2012.
While many of the international personnel left, some of the Syrian staff came to Lebanon and Morocco to continue their work.
“Now we cannot even enter [the center in Aleppo]. We still have the gene bank there, we hear it has more or less continuous electricity and its ok, but that’s all we know,” he said.
Roughly a year ago ICARDA made the first withdrawal of 40,000 seeds from the Svalbard bank to start replacing the potentially lost stock from Aleppo. Of those seeds, 8,600, went to Lebanon in literal and figurative black boxes – only to be opened by ICARDA – that now line the metal shelves of the temporary facility provided by the American University of Beirut’s Advancing Research Enabling Communities Center a few kilometers from Terbol.
Four thousand of those seeds were planted, harvested, and are being prepared for storage to be sent back to Svalbard to replace the withdrawal. Currently dozens of young women, most of them from the surrounding villages, deftly sift through mounds of seed, separating the rough husks of wheat from the chaff at the loaned AUB building.
“It was a great success – the growth season, the production, everything. We were so worried something would happen. But it all went well,” Yazbek said.
Other copies will be kept at the new center in Terbol, where much of the work that is now being done in one cramped room in the AUB center will have a specialized facility at the new site. The completion of building work was marked with an event at the end of September, under the patronage of Agriculture Minister Akram Chehayeb and in the presence of ICARDA’s director-general and the Norwegian ambassador, among others.
Eventually 130,000 samples could be housed in the “base collection” of the new facility – a room of long rows of metal mobile shelves kept at a brisk minus 20 degrees Celsius.
The Aleppo facility was one of the biggest seed banks in the world, with around 150,000 samples of numerous species native to the region. However, Yazbek, put the achievement in perspective, pointing out that there are 400,000 “described” species on the planet.
Around 3,000 of those are cultivated worldwide, but only three feed most of the global population – rice, wheat and maize – Yazbek said.
The work is not only large in scale, but also in time. The seeds are meant to last decades. Some of ICARDA’s samples have been stored for 30 years but are able to last much longer with careful monitoring. “This is ongoing work, it is something for now and for the future,” she added.
It was the reason why regenerating the stock from the Aleppo center was crucial. Whether the crops are not needed soon or if they are used by farmers to rebuild Syria’s heavily agriculture-dependent economy after the war, they are insurance policies for an uncertain future.
Despite the numerous threats to biodiversity, Machlab can find comfort that this crucial resource is shored-up against conflict or catastrophe, and ICARDA can continue to preserve and improve the region’s agricultural inheritance.
“I don’t know exactly the situation now, but I would say we have peace of mind that we have duplicated everything. If the gene bank in Aleppo is gone, I think we have most of the things that we lost,” he said.
By Susannah Walden
