BEIRUT — An organization working to save seeds threatened by Syria’s ongoing civil war has asked the world’s largest seed vault in Norway for access to some of the genetic materials it has stored there.
The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon, made the request last month to officials with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the agency said. ICARDA’s gene bank in Syria has about 150,000 accessions and distributes more than 25,000 samples annually around the world, according to the organization.
While ICARDA’s storage facilities in Syria were still operational as of last month, the country’s civil war has significantly affected genetic resources activity, organization officials said. The agency has secured all of its germplasm collection stored in Aleppo, Syria, through duplication and storage in other countries, they noted.
"Until recently, we were using and dispatching bulk seeds of these genetic materials to meet requests from Aleppo in spite of the tough security situation," said Mahmoud Solh, ICARDA’s director general. "ICARDA requested some of its stored material in Svalbard in order to reconstitute the active collection in both Morocco and Lebanon in large bulks, to meet requests for germplasm from the collections we have to meet the challenges facing dry areas globally.
"Once we multiply these varieties, ICARDA will return part of it to Svalbard as another duplicated set."
ICARDA’s gene bank has a collection of landraces and wild relatives of barley, lentil, chickpea, rangeland species and wheat. It has materials from 128 countries. The Aleppo facility specifically stores cereals and legumes, many rare, collected over the past four decades. ICARDA was founded in 1977, its seed bank created in 1983.
The Svalbard seed vault, housed on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean, provides free storage of seeds for countries worldwide. The role of the vault is not to act as a gene bank but, rather, to provide for preservation of duplicate collections on behalf of other seed and gene banks, according to Norway’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
The rights to the seeds remain with the depositors. The vault opened in 2008 and has more than 865,000 seed samples in storage.
ICARDA’s request is the first time an organization has asked for materials previously stored in its facility, Svalbard officials said. Representatives of Svalbard couldn’t be reached for additional comment.
