There is something necessarily portentous about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It is a marvel of ingenuity, collaboration and beauty, but it also evokes a sense of unease. It is difficult to regard its image without also thinking of failed crops, widespread hunger and war.
The seed vault’s extreme security and isolation might seem like overkill, but it really isn’t. American agriculturalist Cary Fowler, who spearheaded the development of the vault, knew very well that seed genebanks can be severely damaged or even destroyed, precisely because they have been on many occasions. Sometimes, natural disasters were to blame. In 1972, a genebank in Nicaragua collapsed during a major earthquake. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch destroyed the national genebank in the Honduras, along with 70 per cent of the country’s food crops. Most of the seed collection at the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory in the Philippines was wiped out by a typhoon in 2006, and Thailand’s rice genebank was flooded during the 2011 monsoon season, causing the loss of some 20,000 accessions. But if the story of the Siege of Leningrad tells us anything, it’s that genebanks are especially vulnerable to the destructive force of human conflicts.
In 1980, a rice genebank in Sierra Leone was destroyed in a local conflict between security forces and workers, during which the cold-storage equipment was looted and the seeds were left to rot. During Liberia’s second civil war in the early 2000s, two major local gene-banks were looted and ruined, and several staff members were killed. In 2001, as the conflict in Afghanistan escalated, a genebank in Kabul came under threat. That seed collection was extensive, comprising numerous varieties of regional crop species, and it had taken years to establish. In response to approaching skirmishes, the collection was divided and sent to two different cities where they were hidden in private homes. But it was to no avail, as the conflict spread to these areas as well. According to reports, looters dumped the seeds and stole the containers in which they had been stored. Any seeds not ruined were now largely useless. The meticulous records on each sample were rendered meaningless.
Then there was the incident at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. This name has become notorious, now inexorably linked with the egregious human rights abuses that took place at the prison complex of that name during the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. But as journalist Mark Schapiro recounts in his book Seeds of Resistance, Abu Ghraib once enjoyed a positive reputation. Abu Ghraib, you see, is simply the name of a district of Baghdad, a suburb of sorts, some forty minutes’ drive outside the main city. Before the war, it was a regional centre for agricultural research – there is even an indigenous variety of wheat named after it. The Iraq National Genebank was established in Abu Ghraib in the 1970s and researchers spent decades collecting crop species and crop wild relatives, building a collection of seeds representing more than 1400 varieties, many unique to the local region.
Schapiro explains that, as fighting intensified in and around Baghdad in the spring of 2003, the genebank was hit by a rocket and destroyed. Not all was lost in the explosion, however. It seems that, several years earlier, scientists at the Abu Ghraib genebank sent a box containing duplicate samples to a collaborating genebank elsewhere in the Middle East. This was referred to as a ‘black box’ seed collection, but as journalist Fred Pearce would later report in New Scientist, it was actually an old, taped-up cardboard box. What mattered, of course, were the contents: precious seeds representing hundreds of varieties of more than twenty-eight crops, ranging from wheat to chickpeas. As far as anyone knew, these were now the only copies left. As for the genebank where the seeds were sent for safekeeping, well, that was the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and at the time it was based in Syria. You can probably see where this is heading.
The thing is, ICARDA was never really meant to be in Syria. It was established in Beirut in the late 1970s, but this was also not long after the civil war in Lebanon began. As that conflict escalated, ICARDA’s directors accepted an offer to establish a new facility in Syria, near the village of Tal Hadya, just south-west of Aleppo. It was a good set-up, complete with laboratories, offices and crop fields on nearly 1000 hectares. Over the course of nearly three decades, ICARDA worked with farmers and breeders both locally and in more than fifty other countries to improve crop cultivation in dryland temperate areas. They also conducted extensive plant-breeding research as they hunted for solutions to crop diseases, drought intolerance and other crop-related issues.
Safaa Kumari, a plant virologist at ICARDA, has for example spent decades investigating viral diseases in pulse crops. One of her key interests is faba bean necrotic yellows virus (FBNYV), a nanovirus transmitted by aphids which not only targets faba beans but also a range of other legumes, including chickpeas, lentils and peas. These legumes are a major source of protein and other nutrients in resource-poor areas, so when epidemics of FBNYV strike, the resulting crop failures have devastating consequences in terms of food insecurity and economic losses. Kumari spent years searching for faba bean varieties with resistance to FBNYV, the aim being that if such a trait existed, it could be crossbred into existing high-yield crops. As Kumari recently explained to Tarek Abd El-Galil of Al-Fanar Media, by 2009 she had found a variety that when exposed to the virus, a small fraction survived. She knew she was on to something, so she continued breeding these pathogen-resistant plants, until she at last had bred more than two dozen faba plants, all of which were resistant to FBNYV.
ICARDA researchers have also spent decades going on plant-collection missions, searching for traditional landraces and crop wild relatives. Over time, ICARDA established an enormous seed genebank, a collection of thousands and thousands of traditional landraces and crop wild relatives of wheat, barley, lentil, faba beans, grass peas, chickpeas and more. ‘It’s one of the most unique collections worldwide,’ ICARDA’s Mariana Yazbek tells me, explaining that a big reason for this is that ICARDA has a long tradition of going on collection missions in the Fertile Crescent region, as well as West Asia and North Africa. The Fertile Crescent, in fact, is right in their proverbial backyard. As the oldest known centre of origin for plant domestication, it represents one of the most precious resources of crop plant genetic diversity in the world. And so ICARDA has kept collecting, going from fields to farms, from hillside to hillside, valley to valley, village to village.
As Yazbek and her colleagues from ICARDA and NordGen recently explained in the journal Nature Plants in 2020, ICARDA ultimately amassed the largest collection of unique species from the Fertile Crescent region, ‘harbouring traits of importance for making crops more resilient in the face of climate change, pests and diseases, and adverse weather conditions’. These were rare and valuable varieties, some of them ancient, some no longer in existence outside the collection. ICARDA’s seeds, the researchers emphasised, ‘represent some of the most precious biodiversity to humanity on the planet’.
But all was not well in Syria. During the Arab Spring uprising of 2010–11, pro-democracy protests swept through much of the Arab world. In Syria, teenagers spray-painted anti-government graffiti on a wall in Dara’a, a town so ancient it is mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphs dating to the 14th century BCE – it has witnessed many an empire rise and fall. That graffiti was a spark in a tinderbox. There was a harsh backlash by the government, followed by a public backlash to the backlash, and a full-blown conflict was soon underway. The fighting approached Aleppo in the summer of 2012, and in nearby Tal Hadya, the situation quickly deteriorated. As the skirmishes intensified, armed groups began to make raids on the ICARDA facility, stealing equipment, trucks and livestock. Then, two ICARDA staff members were kidnapped by a group of rebels. Fortunately, they were later released, but it was clear that ICARDA needed to get out, and fast.
International staff were evacuated while local staff remained behind to move research records, computers, biotechnology equipment and anything else that could be shifted, to the temporary safety of the ICARDA annex in Aleppo. As conditions grew more desperate, Safaa Kumari gathered the seeds of her FBNYV-resistant faba plants and hid them in her sister’s home in Aleppo. But the rest of ICARDA’s collection, much of which required special storage conditions involving low humidity and temperatures no higher than −18°C, posed a bigger problem. There was simply no way to move many of the seeds to Aleppo without risking their ruin. The journey to the city was now long and perilous, with nowhere to keep the seed collection safe and cold on arrival.
And as it turned out, Aleppo itself wasn’t safe at all. As journalists Nathanaël Chouraqui and Adib Chowdhury reported in The Guardian, Kumari was about to embark on a harrowing journey. While attending a research conference in Ethiopia, she received a call from her distressed mother in Aleppo: her family had just been forced by armed men to evacuate, with only a moment’s notice. Those same men now had control of the building. Kumari’s family were able to escape the city, but the seeds were still there. Those seeds represented decades of research and the first real chance to cultivate legume crops resistant to FBNYV, which could help to improve food security throughout the region and reduce reliance on pesticides. Kumari had to go back for them. As she later reported to the BBC, she made her way from Addis Ababa to Cairo, to Istanbul, then Damascus, and from there made the dangerous journey to Aleppo amid the fighting and bombings. Somehow, she made it. What’s more, she was able to talk her way into her sister’s building and discovered, to her relief, that the seeds were unscathed. She packed them up and escaped to Lebanon.
Meanwhile, in Tal Hadya, the remaining staff at ICARDA were staging an even bigger rescue mission, one that was no less dangerous. Yazbek tells me it’s important to understand that ICARDA has a long practice of making duplicates of their seed collections and sending batches of these to other genebanks for safekeeping: ‘Throughout the past thirty to forty years we have been sending copies of the collection somewhere else. When the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008, we were one of the pioneer seedbanks to say, well, we’re sending a copy to Svalbard, as well.’ The day the seed vault officially opened, ICARDA was there with more than 30,000 accessions, ready for storage. Between 2008 and 2012 they sent more shipments to Svalbard, but war broke out well before they’d finished duplicating the whole collection, so ICARDA staff remained behind to ship as many seeds to Svalbard as they could.
It was a daunting task. As some of the staff involved later recounted to Mark Schapiro, when Tal Hadya was taken over by rebel forces, they had to source generators and fuel to provide power to the refrigerated storage facility. Then they had to negotiate with the rebels to not only leave the facility intact but also to actively protect it and keep the generators running. It just so happened there were farmers among the rebels who understood the importance of preserving seeds, so they agreed. Small mercies, indeed.
Over the next three years, ICARDA staff were able to access the genebank at Tal Hadya in order to prepare three more shipments to Svalbard. They monitored the situation in Aleppo and whenever a precious window of opportunity opened up, they moved quickly to get seeds shipped out. ‘They did an amazing job,’ says Yazbek, still marvelling at the dedication of ICARDA’s Syrian staff in the face of enormous logistical challenges and threats to their own safety. ‘It was risky, but there was a decision to just continue,’ she says. ‘They realised the importance of completing the task.’
The last shipment arrived in Svalbard in January 2014, half a world away from the war and the unfolding humanitarian crisis. All told, 116,000 seed accessions had been duplicated, roughly 83 per cent of ICARDA’s original collection. Then the security situation in Syria deteriorated to such an extent that it was no longer possible to ship anything out via Aleppo. That left nearly 14,000 seed accessions at Tal Hadya for which there were no duplicates anywhere. These remaining seeds were smuggled out via the back roads of Syria and into Lebanon and Turkey.
By September 2015, staff could no longer access the Tal Hadya facility. Remote monitoring continued until early 2017 when even this was no longer possible. At this time, no one knows what has become of the genebank at Tal Hadya, including whether it still exists at all.
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As the Syrian civil war raged on, it was clear that no one would be going back for a long time. With scores of vital research projects underway involving collaborators around the world, as well as numerous farmers and breeders in the Middle East relying on their expertise and their seeds, ICARDA could not afford to wait. Although they had regularly sent batches of safety duplicates to other genebanks over the past few decades, there was a real concern about the viability of those backups – some of them were almost forty years old. But the seeds at Svalbard were a different story. ‘They are more fresh and they’re all in one place, or at least 82 per cent of them are in one place,’ Yazbek tells me. ‘So that’s how it happens: okay, let’s go get everything we have in Svalbard and multiply it and reconstruct the collection somewhere else.’ And so, one day in September 2015, representatives of ICARDA arrived in Longyearbyen. They had come for their seeds. This was the first withdrawal ever made from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
To reconstruct an entire genebank as large as ICARDA’s is no mean feat. It involves planting the seeds, growing them and collecting the new generation of seeds. ICARDA couldn’t do this just anywhere, says Yazbek. She explained that most of their seeds are ‘collected in this part of the world – the Fertile Crescent, West Asia, North Africa – and it has very particular ecological and environmental conditions. So, for the wild species in particular, you want to conserve them, you want to be able to plant them in this type of environment.’
Fortunately, ICARDA’s original headquarters in Lebanon were still there, and the close proximity to Syria meant it was possible for Syrian staff to reach it. It was decided that ICARDA would set up two hubs. The one in Lebanon would focus on crop wild relatives, as the environment in that country is ideal for growing them, Yazbek tells me. The second hub would be an entirely new facility in Morocco, which would focus on cultivated crop varieties.
ICARDA has made three major withdrawals from the seed vault since 2015, and each year for the past six years, ICARDA staff have planted between 25,000 and 33,000 seeds in the fields at the two international locations. ‘This was massive, I assure you, this was an unprecedented task,’ says Yazbek, who is leading the genebank reconstruction operation in Lebanon. ‘We had staff that didn’t take one day off during a whole year for the two years because we were all on our toes and our stomachs [were] cramped because we were so worried. What if something happens? We have almost one-fifth of our collection in the field. If you have a fire, if you have some natural disaster, if you have locusts, something. It was such a huge responsibility.’
But they were not just on the lookout for threats. This was also a unique opportunity for discovery. Had it not been for the circumstances necessitating the reconstruction of the entire genebank, ICARDA would have never planted that many different crop varieties simultaneously. According to Yazbek, it amounted to ‘a natural experiment’. She says, ‘We had twenty-five to thirty thousand samples growing in the same field at the same time. It was an experiment because [they’re] subjected to the same environment, same diseases … and they’re responding differently!’
‘This year,’ continues Yazbek, ‘we had very low temperatures and some of the samples that were growing in the field were more tolerant than others to the frost.’ In 2021, there was also an outbreak of wheat rust in a huge field full of different varieties of wild wheat. Some were highly susceptible while others were resistant, she recalls. ‘They were sitting right next to each other. One of them had this disease on it. One of them didn’t have the disease on it! It was very, very interesting. We have collected data that we have yet to fully comprehend.’
ICARDA has managed to rebuild a substantial portion of its pre-existing seed collection. Over the past few years they have been making regular deposits at Svalbard, and have also sent fresh duplicates to other genebanks to replace the old backups. There is more work ahead. More seeds are yet to be withdrawn from the original deposits at Svalbard, and then there are seeds that never made it to Svalbard. It all needs to be duplicated. Yazbek and her colleagues expect to continue their seed-duplication work for years to come. In the meantime, all that hard work has put ICARDA back on track. They are able to send samples to breeders and researchers, and to continue their own research, such as finding out which genes are enabling those crop wild relatives to be resistant to rust or frost.
Safaa Kumari is now head of the Seed Health Laboratory at ICARDA in Lebanon, where those seeds she risked her life to save have led to the development of a new variety of FBNYV-resistant faba beans with good yields. She hopes to be able to provide them to farmers within the next few years.
There are many other projects back in action, too, including one centred on a humble little legume called grass pea (Lathyrus sativus). It is high-yielding; full of nutrients, protein and fibre; drought-tolerant and flood-tolerant; doesn’t mind high salinity; most pests hate it; and apparently it tastes pretty good. Unfortunately, it contains high levels of a neurotoxin. According to Crop Trust, grass pea is harmless when consumed in small quantities but causes paralysis in adults and brain damage in children when used as a major food source for three months or more, which can happen during famine when it’s the only surviving crop. ‘So, we are breeding to reduce toxins in the crop,’ says Yazbek. A low level of toxin is simply a trait, she explains, and it’s found in some wild relatives of grass pea in ICARDA’s genebank. Yazbek and her colleagues are crossbreeding these wild relatives with cultivated grass pea to see if they can produce a safe-to-eat variety, which would be an enormous breakthrough for global food security.
Such are the possibilities contained within a few small seeds.