15

Grains, Guns, and Desertification

For the first time since cities were built and founded,

The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,

The inundated tracts produced no fish,

The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,

The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum tree did not grow.

—“The Curse of Akkad,” ca. 2100 BCE

After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, archaeologists rushed to save the country’s antiquities. Saddam Hussein’s regime had begun to fall. The chaos of the transition threatened the country’s treasures. Scholars gathered much of the art and many of the antiquities from Iraq’s national archaeological museum. In doing so, they faced many of the same challenges faced by those attempting to save the art of the Hermitage when Hitler surrounded Leningrad. Unlike the objects in the Hermitage, though, many of the great antiquities of Iraq were lost or destroyed. Among the most significant treasures of Iraq were seeds.

The seeds of Iraq are the great works of art and science produced by the traditional farmers of Mesopotamia. Each, in its genes, bears the handprints of antiquity, the labor of thousands. Iraq’s seeds are the direct descendants of the seeds on which Western civilization was built, descendants that have been improved over ten thousand years of farming, winnowing, and exchanging. Before the wars began, Iraq was self-sustaining with regard to food. If it was ever going to be again, it would need its ancient seeds. The very seeds threatened by the war. Fortunately, at least some had already been duplicated in other collections.1 But many existed only in Iraq, whether in the field or in seed banks. Those in farmers’ fields, if they were to survive, would have to endure the atrocities of the war alongside the farmers. The fragile seeds were tied to the equally fragile lives of women and men. The seeds in the seed bank would just have to get lucky, but given their location, the odds of that seemed slim. The seed bank of Iraq was stored in Abu Ghraib, a city just west of Baghdad bombed and attacked by both sides (it would become famous as the site of a US prison). Fortunately, those who worked to bank Iraq’s seeds did not trust luck.

The seed collection from Abu Ghraib was gathered up in 2003. With little announcement, the seeds of antiquity, the seeds of Mesopotamia, the seeds directly descended from those that formed the basis of the first real civilization, were packed into a cardboard box. The box, after being folded and taped shut, was sent to ICARDA, in Syria—the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. There the box was put on a shelf for storage, the unceremonious fate of Mesopotamia’s most direct legacy. Back in Iraq, the building that had housed the seed collection was bombed. By the United States, perhaps, or the British. The seeds had been shipped just in time. They could be used in Iraq again, after the war,² whenever that time might come,³ used again in the fields where they and Mesopotamia arose. In the meantime, the US government, in an attempt to restore agriculture, had seeds from American companies distributed in Iraq in 2004. It was part of Operation Amber Waves, which included Order 81,⁴ prohibiting the seeds the Iraqis were given from being reused. They would have to purchase the seeds—based on plants domesticated in Mesopotamia—from the American companies each year.

We used to describe what happened somewhere in or near Mesopotamia more than ten thousand years ago as if it were an invention. We picture a gatherer in the high grass. She is carrying a basket filled with hard-won grains. Tired, she is struck in an instant by a bolt of insight. Farming! She can plant the grains and grow them!

More likely farming was understood to be possible in one form or another long before it was practiced with regularity. For the grain gatherers, how hard would it have been, when a few stored grains sprouted leaves, to set them in the soil? How hard would it have been to sow a few? Yet for most of the million years of human history in Mesopotamia and the broader Fertile Crescent, no one did.

Then circumstances changed. Beginning around 10,000 BCE, people settled in small villages in the Zagros mountains to the east of Mesopotamia (today’s Iran) and began to gather the seeds of wild grains, chickpeas, and lentils. With time, the seeds of these plants were planted. Why this might happen is an open question. Perhaps more food was needed. Seeds were sown as a way to buffer the lack of food in times of scarcity—perhaps the scarcity imposed by the confluence of population growth and changes in climate.5 What we do know is that eventually grain seeds were planted. Once they were, each new year farmers wrested a little more control over what was being grown. At the end of each year, the seeds of the plants that grew better—the ones that had better flavor, had seeds that didn’t fall out (shatter) when simply nudged, produced larger seeds, matured early, and otherwise suited the needs of the time—were more likely than other seeds to get stored for the next year.⁶ Those varieties that were no good were burned or pulled, disfavored in some way or other. This cycle was repeated generation after generation and, in the process, wild plants were domesticated. Each story of domestication was unique. And yet the general features of the story were the same everywhere.

With the very first plant domestication—wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils—came larger settlements and then, ultimately (around 3500 BCE), the first civilization, Mesopotamia, in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. It started in the wetter southern region (in what is now Iraq) but would ultimately spread north as well (into what is now Syria). The first wheat was durum wheat (Triticum durum),⁷ what we now call pasta wheat, to be followed by common wheat, or bread wheat (Triticum aestivum).⁸ In this same region, in about 2350 BCE, writing began. In Mesopotamia, empire began when, in 2334 BCE, Sargon of Akkad subjugated the cities of southern and northern Mesopotamia under his rule.9

Amid the modern realities of the region it is easy to forget that Western culture and food emerged in the Middle East. You might not be genetically from the Middle East, but many features of your daily life are. Mesopotamia was the beginning of the West. But Mesopotamia was more than a beginning; it was also a kind of end. Once humans started to farm, they were wed to the field. There was no way to return to gathering. Populations grew fast, thanks to agriculture, and as they did they became ever more dependent on their crops. The crops, in turn, became ever more dependent on people. When the people suffered, the crops suffered. When the crops suffered, the people suffered. Farming was not an insight; it was instead a marriage, a bond between humans and seeds. It is the marriage on which the subsequent civilizations of the Old World, be they Persia, Greece, or Rome, are based.

This bond¹⁰ was forged thousands of years ago; it is a bond from which we cannot escape. We are now charged with spreading the seed of plants forever, as long as our kind might hope to exist. We hold back pests. We provide fertilizer and water. The plants, they give us sustenance in return—food made from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and the minerals hidden between the grains of desert sand. Those who study farming study ways to ensure that we get as much as possible from plants.

Ahmed Amri is one of those who now works to save the agriculture of Mesopotamia. Amri grew up at the edge of a great desert. On bad days, sands from the Sahara darkened the sky. On good days, it rained, and his region was one of the few places in the country where water flowed and the landscape grew green with leaves. As a boy, Amri became interested in the farms at the edge of the desert and how to improve them. He wanted to become, if not quite a farmer, someone who might make farming better, easier, or both.

Amri finished his schooling, up to his undergraduate degree, in Morocco. He then signed up as a graduate student in the department of agronomy at Kansas State University. Once there, he studied which of the wheat varieties from the Middle East were resistant to the larvae of Hessian flies, a pest that attacks wheat stems. The Hessian fly has spread everywhere wheat grows; it is diminutive and devastating. It poses the biggest problem in places where farms are small and pesticides expensive, such as northern Africa and central Asia. The goal of Amri’s work and that of his colleagues at Kansas was to breed varieties of wheat resistant to the Hessian fly. Amri made good headway. He even identified the individual genes in some wheat varieties that seemed to be responsible for resistance.11 It was beautiful work, elegant in a way that academics like—but it was not yet useful. However, the skills he learned in doing this work were useful, and they could be applied right away. Amri chose to apply them back in Morocco, where he worked to breed new varieties of wheat and barley tolerant to drought and resistant to pests. His was the hard, necessary work of counting seeds, making crosses, waiting for plants to grow.

While Amri was working in Morocco, another job came up, this one in Aleppo, Syria, at ICARDA. Amri took it. At ICARDA Amri worked to coordinate the genetic resources of the center, its collection of seeds, roots, and tubers.¹² Aleppo, often said to be the oldest inhabited city in Syria, was chosen as the new site for ICARDA in 1980 because Syria was stable and prosperous. It had the right climate for research on arid lands and is located in the heart of the Fertile Crescent, the arc of rain-fed agriculture lands that surrounds ancient Mesopotamia. Also, Beirut, the city in which ICARDA was first founded, in 1977, had become an active war zone.

By the time Amri arrived, more than a hundred employees of ICARDA were already working to improve the farming of crops and livestock that do well in dry areas. In the manner of Vavilov, they stored seeds. ICARDA’s beautifully curated collection held more than 141,000 different seed samples. The collection is one of the largest of barley, beans, chickpeas, and lentils, all of which were domesticated in or near Mesopotamia. But it is especially impressive for its wheat, which is represented by 38,000 varieties; barley, by 29,000 varieties; and the wild relatives of wheat, by 8,000 varieties.

Beyond storing seeds, though, ICARDA works with farmers to use those seeds. From the farmers, they learned what the worst problems in fields were. They also learned about other varieties of seeds not in the collection. They then systematically tried to improve both the seed collections and the crops. To improve the seed collections, they predicted where in the region local crop varieties would be most likely to have the ability to adapt to conditions (drought, heat, salinity) and resist pests and went there to search for new seed varieties. They then used every trick in the agricultural book to breed new crops. And it all worked. Wheat varieties have been bred that are resistant to sunn pests (kin to the stink bug),13 some Hessian flies, and powdery mildew. And new varieties have been bred that grow better under conditions of drought and high salinity. ICARDA was and is, in short, dedicated to the same things to which Amri is dedicated, at a large scale in the region in which, in many ways, they most matter.

ICARDA is important to all of North Africa and the Middle East. This entire region is dry and dependent on its own agriculture and agricultural innovation and always has been. ICARDA is not the only international center for crop breeding in the region, but it is the largest. Most others tend to be focused on particular countries, and in a region divided deeply by politics, breeding and agricultural centers focused on particular countries do not always help all mouths equally. In addition, the region, although dry, differs in terms of how dry and in terms of what sorts of crops are farmed. North Africa and the Middle East together are now thought to include not one but two centers of crop diversity, centers that layer on top of ancient history and also are embedded in modern struggles.

Though Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent were historically fertile, both in terms of their soil and their agricultural innovation, modern farmers there struggle. The fertility of the region has always been bound to the rivers and the rains—bound to faraway rainfall, local rainfall, and the ability to irrigate. Once, this water and the crops it sustained were enough for the people of the region. Today, however, while small farmers plant a great richness of varieties, the total quantity of food produced in the region is less than is needed by the people who live there. On global maps of agricultural productivity, the pockets of farms in the region are so sparse they don’t even show up. The condition of the North African and Middle Eastern centers of crop diversity is like that of other such centers around the world.

Since the return of the conquistadors from the Americas, the productive agricultural regions have become those in relatively cool, relatively northern countries. In those countries, the affluence that followed the era of the conquistadors led to greater investment in science, agricultural intensification, and, ultimately, crop yield, which in turn led to even more affluence. This cycle was self-fulfilling. Ever greater intensification of agriculture led crops to be produced more cheaply, too, which reduced the value of the same crops when planted by small landholders (in the tropics and North Africa, for example). With the value of wheat too low to yield a profit for a small farm, agriculturalists in these regions shifted to cash crops for export at the expense of their own food. North Africa and the Middle East are like much of the tropical and subtropical world in terms of their place in the geographic push and pull of crops. In terms of climate, however, they are unique.

While models of the future climate of some regions of earth—for example, the southeastern United States—are uncertain (some models predict the Southeast will get wetter, others that it will get drier), little ambiguity exists in models for North Africa and most of the Middle East. All predict they will become much, much hotter and much drier, receiving half the rain they currently receive. A study conducted by Pinhas Alpert at Tel Aviv University predicts that the Euphrates River, lifeblood of civilization, will be 25 to 70 percent drier by the year 2100, even before considering any changes in the use of its waters.14 This would not be the first time drought has struck the civilizations of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Fertile Crescent.

Mesopotamia was once ruled by leaders in a group of cities on the border between what are now Iraq and Syria, cities strung like jewels along the rivers. These cities were agricultural cities that, under the rule of the grandson of Sargon of Akkad, were united into an empire (just how united is the subject of the sort of endless debate that will keep archaeologists passively-aggressively furious and engaged at meetings for the next century). Each city held tens—in some cases hundreds—of thousands of people. These cities had their roots in the first villages in the region where crops were domesticated, but from those simple roots they grew.

Then, in roughly 2200 BCE, everything changed. The cities collapsed. In reconstructing this collapse, one reported mostly in story rather than in artifact, historians struggled to discern truth from fable. They struggled, even, to know for sure if there had been a collapse. Maybe, they said, the myth was just a lament, an ordinary sort of whining, about the empire’s challenges. Maybe it was a moralizing myth that stood as an example not of something that had happened but of what not to do. It could not have been a true story of catastrophe.15 Then the discovery of the city of Tell Leilan by archaeologist Harvey Weiss, on the Khabur plains, in Syria, began to clarify things. Tell Leilan was in the northern half of Mesopotamia, a region that had been, until Weiss began his work, relatively poorly studied in comparison to the southern parts of the region, in Iraq.

Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated Tell Leilan beginning in 1979. The occupation of the site was so ancient, going back to at least 6000 BCE, that Weiss and his team needed to dig their excavation trenches six meters (eighteen feet) into the ground to capture the whole story, a story on top of which eighteen feet of sand and time had settled. In those trenches, they found a clear chronology of the city. They saw, in the layers of walls, broken bricks, and dust, the markers of a growing population, measured by the geographic size of the city. For thousands of years, the settlement was the size of a village, but bit by bit, millennium by millennium, it grew. By 2800 BCE, it was thirty-seven acres. By 2400 BCE, it was two hundred acres. Then in subsequent years, once the grandson of Sargon conquered the city and incorporated it into the empire of Akkad, the city grew even more, as did the scale of agriculture. Wheat was grown; barley, too, as well as olives, grapes, peas, sweet peas, chickpeas, dates, and safflower (for dye).¹⁶ The city had a wide, paved street and planned settlements where people drank beer and wine and ate bread and the meat of goats and pigs. Durum wheat, emmer wheat, barley, and other cereals were stored in centralized government facilities and distributed by the government in standardized sealed containers, marked with the city’s logos, administrative seals, all of them showing banquet scenes. It was a major city within a broader agricultural empire, and it was growing fast: then, all of a sudden, in the strata of the excavation pits closer to the surface, the evidence of the city and its occupants, after four thousand years of habitation, disappeared. As Weiss and his team dug through the layers of time, the layer corresponding to 2200 BCE seemed to be empty. No evidence of humans. No domestic animals. Not even the evidence of earthworms could be found. What’s more, the layer in the trenches they dug corresponding to 2200 BCE and thereafter seemed to be filled with dust. It was as though the people had just disappeared. This is just what Weiss thinks happened.

In 1993, Weiss suggested that the layer of sand devoid of human artifacts was a sign of a drought, of hunger, and the consequent death and emigration of the people of the first great empire ever to have existed.17 The cultural evidence of emigration was found elsewhere in the region, Weiss noted; in southern Mesopotamia, clay tablets mention the arrival of refugees from northern Mesopotamia. Similar transitions (though of varying extremes) were being discovered in archaeological sites in the Aegean, Egyptian, and Indus regions.

Climatologists were skeptical. But when they began to look for evidence of drought, they found it. First they found ancient evidence of links between the climate of the eastern Mediterranean and the flow of the rivers of Mesopotamia.¹⁸ This was suggestive, but doubt persisted. Then they noted that during the period in which Mesopotamian cities collapsed, a drought had occurred in the eastern Mediterranean. The eastern Mediterranean dried, and, because rains come from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia (or fail to), so, too, did the Tigris and Euphrates; so, too, did the agricultural fields alongside them. And with the collapse of those fields occurred the collapse of the cities they sustained. More recent research suggests that just prior to the collapse, in the moments when food was becoming scarce, the health of those who remained deteriorated. Infections became common, bones became stunted and weak, and anemia was widespread.19 Then there was one final piece of evidence. Cities did not reappear in the region until the drought was over, nearly three hundred years later. Here, then, was a terrifying model for the future, especially since future climate models are clear that a drought will come again to the region and that it will never, not for hundreds or even thousands of years, be over.²⁰

In light of the predictions of long-term regional drought (and the foreshadowing provided by the region’s past), finding and saving all the crop varieties and wild relatives of crops able to deal with dry conditions, and breeding those crops to deal both with drought and heat, is key to the survival of hundreds of millions of people in the future. It is key, too, to the political stability of the region. Governments fall when their food supply collapses. ICARDA and other research centers must find new ways to feed millions of people on an ever-decreasing supply of water. They must do so with relatively modest funding, despite the significance of their goal and despite the comparatively huge cost of the alternative—war.

Figure 13. Relative expenditure on crop research and other efforts by ICARDA in 2006 compared to the weekly budget of the US government for the war in Iraq during the same period. Data source: ICARDA annual report.

For Ahmed Amri, once he had moved to ICARDA, some of the aspects of the work were similar to his experience in Morocco. But at ICARDA he had and felt more responsibility to the center as well as to the region. Because ICARDA is the center for agriculture in dry regions, the team with which Amri would work there was far larger and the collections of seeds far more expansive than they were in Morocco. In addition, with wars in countries near Syria, it was a hub of peace on which those other regions, including Iraq, would ultimately depend for the future of their agriculture. ICARDA was the “lender of last resort”21 for countries in need of seeds after war. It was also the go-to institution when seeds needed to be saved before war. So predictable were the wars of the broader region that this pair of needs had been identified and fulfilled repeatedly. When Afghanistan’s national seed bank was looted, for example, in 2002, it was ICARDA that sent seeds so that crops might be planted the following year. Amri was present for that shipment. Then, just a year later, came the war in Iraq. Amri was present for that shipment—that cardboard box of seeds—as well.

As of 2005, the Iraqi seeds stayed on the shelf at ICARDA. Amri curated them. He spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which seeds can save or fail to save a country. Of course, it would not be Syria that needed saving next. Not in a region that included Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, Israel and Egypt to the west, and troubled Yemen not so very far to the south. Syria was the stable place, the place Iraqis and Afghans sent their seeds for safekeeping. Syria was the logical place to save the seeds, because among countries of the Middle East it was where things worked. Doctors were trained. Scholars were trained. Nearly everyone was educated. It was, by most metrics, akin to the United States in levels of education and affluence; better off, even, than the state in which I live, North Carolina. This is worth remembering as we consider what happened next.

Beginning in the winter of 2006, Syria and Iraq, along with the rest of the Fertile Crescent, began to suffer a persistent drought. It was among the worst in the region’s well-chronicled modern history. The drought affected the region in general, but especially the parts of Syria and Iraq that most directly correspond to the core of the ancient Mesopotamia. It came after decades of pressure from the government of Syria under president Hafez al-Assad to focus on farming that relied, to a greater extent than at any moment in its long history, on irrigation, using the country’s scarce groundwater supplies. This drought was like previous droughts, only more intense (and, as it would turn out, longer). Because it was coupled with droughts in the headwaters of the Tigris, in Turkey (and, by some accounts, exacerbated by reductions in the amount of water that was released downstream by Turkey), water levels reaching Syria were low, as was the amount of rain falling from the sky. Because the drought came after the intensification of agriculture, which made access to groundwater supplies more difficult, little in the way of other sources of reprieve existed.22

As early as 2006, the very first year of the drought, international scholars began to worry a little about Syria and about the country’s seeds in particular. They worried about whether the seeds needed to be moved. An editorial in the journal Nature suggested it would be better to give more funding to ICARDA and to other seed banks rather than to move the seeds. The United States was, at the time, spending $1 billion per week on the war in Iraq, and, the editorial argued, a $260 million endowment would be enough to save seeds from around the world for good, particularly if it was given to the CGIAR consortium office,²³ the umbrella organization that connects ICARDA to similar centers. Even if one added a zero to such a contribution it would still just represent, at $2.6 billion, two weeks of war funding and less than one-tenth of the annual value of crop losses resulting from pests and pathogens in the United States alone. Such an effort would be of value not only to Syria but also to the nearly 1,750 seed banks and their associated 7.5 million seed samples around the world, all but forty or so of which are struggling to meet international standards of long-term seed saving—struggling even as climate change threatens crops most in the very regions where these seed banks are most diverse. All these things were written about and said, but of course no new investment came. Also, the conditions in Syria got worse.

Crops began to fail. The biggest problem was wheat. Up until 2007, the production of wheat had been increasing in Syria without a corresponding increase in the amount of land being farmed. Between 1991 and 2004 alone, wheat yields doubled. These increases were attributable to the Green Revolution crops (and irrigation of those crops) and then subsequent work on ICARDA’s part to breed new crops. There were bad years, but the net trend was an increase, largely in step with population growth. Then came the drought.

In 2008, wheat production declined by 38 percent relative to 2007.24 In theory, if someone had acted fast enough, the great diversity of Syrian traditional varieties and the new varieties being bred by ICARDA might have been able to deal with the drought. If not in Syria, the site of ancient Mesopotamia and modern ICARDA, then where? In practice, though, whatever dry-adapted crops were present were too few and far between, or simply unable to help fast enough, so villages and their crops dried up, puckered from the heat. While many crops can grow well in arid conditions, few grow well when they must be planted during a drought. Agricultural production declined. More important, the breeding of new crops does not occur fast enough, even with modern techniques, to deal with problems once a crisis has arrived. It must be done in advance.

By the end 2010, Syria was precariously close to having to import wheat for food,²⁵ to import the very crop domesticated in the region. Children suffered from diseases as a result of malnutrition. The problem was made more difficult because the population had grown and become more urban. The urban population increased by roughly 50 percent between 2000 and 2010. This growth included a million Iraqis who moved to Syrian cities in response to the wars, but also 1.5 million Syrians who moved to cities from rural areas (in part due to the failure of crops). Once in the cities, people had few opportunities. The number of people vastly outstripped the number of available jobs. Such rapid change heightened existing instability in the cities, in the country, and in the region. Government policies under the new president, Bashar al-Assad, made these challenges more acute rather than easing them.

Two more hard years passed in 2009 and 2010, springs in which little grew. These years of drought, climate scientists have said, are in line with what is expected to occur more frequently in the region because of the influence of global climate change. Such drought is predicted to become more common and extreme in the coming decades. The years of drought were, in short, a harbinger. The year 2011 once more began as a dry year. Wheat, for the first time in decades, had to be imported. Then, in the dusty, desperate spring, a spring in which few seeds germinated, revolution bloomed.

Historians will long debate the exact dynamics that triggered the uprising. Hopeful citizens revolted against the oppressive Assad government. The government cracked down with great and horrible force. The revolution turned into a war, and in the unrest of this civil war, ISIS—or Daesh, as the group is known in most Arabic-speaking countries—began to seize power in parts of the country, the parts most closely allied with ancient Mesopotamia. The revolution, along with the rise of ISIS, triggered the collapse of the country, the deaths of several hundred thousand Syrians,26 and an immigration wave larger than any since the Irish potato famine—by some measures even larger than the potato famine exodus. No fewer than four million Syrians have left the country: families pack into boats, ride on the backs of trucks, stack themselves into the backs of trains, and flee in any way they can.

In the months when the situation in Syria was getting worse but not yet apocalyptic, even before the uprising, Ahmed Amri decided he needed to get ICARDA’s seeds out of Syria. The ICARDA facility, including its seed bank, had generators but not much fuel. It would not take much for the seeds to be destroyed. Like all those who work in seed banks, Amri knew the stories of other seed banks that no longer exist, that were destroyed. But unlike the other seed banks, ICARDA’s bank was relatively prepared for tragedy. It had already sent duplicates of 87 percent of the seed samples in the collection to other collections, to be saved “just in case.” The duplicates would prevent the total loss of those varieties, though duplicate copies of seeds are typically kept in small numbers, such that if they are ever to be used again, they would have to be grown out in order to produce more seeds. But the rest of the collection, which was huge—more than fourteen thousand samples of who could be sure how many varieties—was not backed up. Amri decided that those seeds, those samples, needed to leave.

The seed-saving mission began in the spring of 2011. It was horrifyingly similar to the efforts of Vavilov’s team. The seeds were taken, by truck, to the north, away from the war, toward the border with Turkey. At the Turkish border, the Turkish representative of the ministry of agriculture met the seeds and helped clear them rapidly through customs and transfer them to the gene bank in Ankara. Other seeds went to Lebanon.

Eventually nearly all the non-Syrians at the center left. They were advised to. This included essentially all the scientists. No one could blame them. Amri stayed until the first week of July in 2012. Then he went back to Morocco, where he would continue to work on behalf of ICARDA, at a distance from the Syrian center.27 His Syrian colleagues stayed guarding the seeds, much as Vavilov’s colleagues did in Leningrad. As in Leningrad, though, the value wasn’t just in the seeds. Around the ICARDA buildings are fields where the varieties of plants with the most promise as crops for dry regions are being grown. As late as May of 2014, the few Syrians left at the seed bank in Syria continued to guard the seeds. Then the war arrived at their door.

Almost any knock on the door would have been bad. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS destroyed several of the most treasured archaeological sites, including ancient Nimrud, one of the oldest cities in the world. ISIS was imitating the actions of those who colonized the ancient cities of the Akkad empire after its fall. When drought struck, the Gutian peoples came over the hill and overran the Akkadian homeland in southern Mesopotamia. They ignored agriculture. They released the animals. They captured women and children (at least in the telling of the Summerians, who also said that the Gutian people had human faces, the cunning of dogs, and the bodies of monkeys). They wrote nothing and were eventually chased back out of the region by the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu. Horror always has antecedents. It also has company. The rebels of 2011, for their part, destroyed Shia mosques and Christian graves while also looting Christian churches. What would they have in store for ICARDA? No one knew.

It was the rebels who arrived first at ICARDA. They included men who lived near the facility; they included men who had personally benefited from the center’s work. Perhaps as a result of this relationship and the awareness on the part of some of the rebels of the importance of seeds, they decided that if the workers at ICARDA fed them from the center’s crops, they would leave the center in peace and allow the workers to continue working. The ICARDA workers had a choice. They could have fled. But they did not. Providing food, they thought, would cost ICARDA little and, at least in the short term, save it much, especially since ICARDA workers do not farm the crops as food—they farm them to study their attributes. They needed only to measure the crops before handing them over to the rebels.28 The workers at ICARDA were grateful for the peace this deal provided. Amri said of this détente, “We’re very lucky that [the rebels] realize the importance of conserving biodiversity; it’s one of the activities that has never been interrupted in Aleppo.… But we cannot predict how each day will be.”²⁹

On October 6, 2015, Russian warplanes carried out air strikes near ICARDA’s compound. It was reported that the facility was directly hit. On October 7, ICARDA put out a press release saying that the Russian bombs had landed near the facility but not on it. Luck—for now.

However one thinks of the future of Syria, its recovery will depend on many steps. Perhaps more war. Definitely diplomacy. But two conclusions are inescapable. One is that if we believe ourselves to be distant from the challenges that agriculture, and food in general, will face in the next decades, the flood of Syrian refugees to countries around the world should remind us that we are not disconnected. Tragedy reconnects us in seconds.

If Syria is to exist again at all as a nation, it will need to reestablish its agriculture. It will need its seeds. This is why, once Ahmed Amri resettled at the ICARDA site in Morocco, he did the unthinkable. He put in a request to the doomsday vault. He requested that the seeds ICARDA had stored in the vault be sent to Morocco and Lebanon so that they could be planted out, increased in number, and then sent around the Middle East, northern Africa, and elsewhere. In an average year, ICARDA distributes twenty-five thousand samples of seeds to those who need them around the world. It plans to continue this work, which would not be possible without the doomsday vault. As Amri said, this continuing mission safeguards “the building blocks for sustaining agricultural development and food security. The CGIAR gene banks are essential for food security; their mission is not controversial, we know how to do it, and it is doable for only $34 million a year.”30 Amri is all too aware of what happens when we collectively fail to achieve food security, as is everyone engaged in the problem of how best to help the hungry people still in Syria as well as the Syrian refugees as they move across Europe.

The whole Middle East faces prolonged drought. We cannot dither in our attempts to produce new crops that deal well with it. The countries, such as Turkey, with the most water may be fine. Similarly, the affluent countries, such as Saudi Arabia, may simply import food. They may trade, as one article noted, carbon for calories. Saudi Arabia in particular has already decided it has too little water to continue to farm; it will focus on oil and import food. But such a strategy is unavailable to many—perhaps most—of the countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Such countries need to innovate agriculturally now. Here, if we return to the Akkadian empire, we can find one more useful insight into the history of our condition. While early excavations of the region focused on Tell Leilan, more recent excavations focused on other cities and small towns in the region. Jason Ur, at Harvard University, contends that these new excavations show a fate for these small cities that was not as dramatic as that of Tell Leilan. They may have persisted longer. Why? They appear, to Ur, to have altered their agriculture prior to or in response to the drought. Ur sees a shift that included farming more area and doing so using different techniques (more fertilizer).31 In the lesson of these cities, one might find hope (though even this is debated).³² Meanwhile, the status quo is that the horrors of the Syrian refugee crisis will be repeated not just within Syria, but among many of the most populous countries in northern Africa and the Middle East.

As for Ahmed Amri, he continues to do the work he was trained to do. There are bad days, worse days, and some good days. Before the collapse of Syria, he was working on identification of the genetic resources needed to develop varieties of wheat resistant to the newest wheat pathogen, Ug99.³³ Ug99 threatens wheat in all those countries too poor to use fungicides. It may be that a wheat variety held at the ICARDA gene bank will save the crops in all those countries. If it does, millions of people will owe a great debt to Amri and his colleagues at ICARDA as well as to the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Svalbard, the Syrians who still work at the site in Aleppo, and the thousands of others over thousands of years who have tended to seeds despite all that has happened in the world. Despite all that can happen. The seeds that, from a tiny grain, can grow enough to feed a nation, maybe even to feed the future. We have to have hope—for the Syrians, for those throughout the Middle East, for all of us. When we look back at the potato famine, we have to wonder: How it is that no one did more to stop the famine? That no one did more to understand its causes? That no one did more to prevent it from ever happening again?