This is the first such “return-to-sender” mission in the Middle East since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was launched in 2008. It is estimated that up to 87 percent of the Syria-grown seeds is now safely stored in a vault deep inside a mountain – the world’s largest facility of its kind – on Svalbard, a Norwegian island 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the North Pole.Īccording to Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, the samples will be sent once paperwork is completed, Reuters reported. We don’t think that seed collection has been lost, as is, right there in Aleppo, but that could come any day now.”Īfter Aleppo fell to rebels in 2012, the center’s staff was forced to relocate to Beirut, where its headquarters are still based. “It’s on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, and Aleppo is in deep trouble right now, with a huge amount of fighting going on. “ had one of the biggest and best collections of wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils,” Fowler told Australia’s ABC News at the time. While the Norwegian minister has opted not to disclose the location to which the seeds are to be sent, the creator of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Professor Cary Fowler, said in August that the center would reestablish its stocks in Morocco and Lebanon. READ MORE: Frozen out: Russia protests to Norway over Svalbard travel restrictions “They will be sent to other countries in the Middle East, since Syria is still affected by war, but for security reasons we will not say where.” Then they want to send the new seeds up here again as a back-up,” Norway’s agriculture minister, Sylvi Listhaug, told VG newspaper. “The gene bank wants use to send some of the seeds back this autumn, to grow and harvest them. It is the first such request since the facility opened in 2008.įorced from its research farm in Aleppo in 2012, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas’ (ICARDA), which provides seed stock for dry Middle Eastern countries, wants almost 130 boxes of seed samples out of the 325 it had deposited in the vault in recent years. “We wanted to make sure that the publicity around this deposit is not taken by someone for different purposes,” Koch told an Associated Press journalist visiting the Svalbard Seed Vault, just 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the North Pole.A Lebanon-based seed bank formerly located in war-torn Syria has requested 116,000 crop samples from an international “doomsday vault” in Svalbard to re-establish the collection elsewhere. The shipments were conducted secretly to avoid any security problems. “It just shows that the global system of fail-safe backup works,” said Michael Koch, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funded the shipments. The center is located in Aleppo but is no longer able to make full use of its facilities due to the war in Syria. In secret shipments last month, about 38,000 seed samples including wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea were sent from Norway to research stations in Morocco and Lebanon operated by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA. Since the facility, sometimes known as a “doomsday vault,” opened eight years ago, this is the first time that seeds have been withdrawn. Gene banks and organizations around the world have deposited about 860,000 samples of seeds at the Global Seed Vault in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago to back up their own collections in case of man-made or natural calamities. The seeds are being planted at new facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, allowing scientists to resume the important research they've been doing for decades, away from the barrel bombs of Aleppo. Now, with no sign of conditions in Syria improving, scientists have begun recovering their critical inventory of seeds, sourced from around the Fertile Crescent and beyond, that have been in safekeeping beneath the Arctic ice. LONGYEARBYEN, Norway: In the first withdrawal from a “doomsday” seed vault in the Arctic, thousands of seeds that were originally kept in war-stricken Syria have been safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon, officials said Monday.
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