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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] The Syrian seed bank that keeps going despite the war | Aeon Ideas
  • Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 12:37:34 -0500

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-syrian-seed-bank-that-keeps-going-despite-the-war?preview=true

For more than four years, the headquarters of the International Center for
Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in the Syrian town of Tal
Hadya has been occupied by the anti-Assad groups Al-Nusra and Ahrar
al-Sham. ICARDA is one of 15 major international agricultural research
centres, and the site of a seed bank housing some 150,000 samples in
temperature-controlled vaults.

Periodic bulletins have assured the public that ‘the seeds are safe’ in the
midst of conflict, duplicated at seed banks outside the country. The Syrian
war precipitated the first ever withdrawal from the subterranean seed vault
at Svalbard in the North Pole last year when ICARDA staff requested
previously deposited material to populate new seed bank facilities in
Lebanon and Morocco.

Yet remarkably, while ancient archaeological sites are destroyed and Syrian
people experience inconceivable loss, the seed bank in Tal Hadya continues
to operate. Its refrigerated vaults remain powered, and a small number of
Syrian staff are permitted by occupying rebels to maintain the facility.
Why?

The answer illuminates what it takes to wage war in the 21st century. Even
before conflict around Aleppo hastened the departure of foreign staff, the
backup generators kicked in as the heat of the summer caused regular power
outages throughout the region. With its specimens carefully
preserved at -20 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit), ICARDA’s seed bank
cannot sustain any failures. The facility’s diesel-fuelled backup
generators insulate it from the blackouts experienced elsewhere.

And these power outages are key to the seed bank’s survival. ICARDA is a
state-of-the-art facility; but its utility to factions in the war is in
large part as a power source. Occupying fighters use ICARDA to charge
laptops and mobile phones, and some profit from the black market in fuel
needed to power the generators.

But this isn’t enough of an explanation for the seed bank’s continued
operation in wartime. While ICARDA ordered expat staff out of Syria, many
native managers and technicians remained. They continued their work,
negotiating daily passage to the facility to retrieve important data and
check the operations of the seed bank. Meanwhile, the herbarium – a
valuable collection consisting of 16,000 dried and pressed wild cereal and
legume specimens from the Fertile Crescent region in Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, Turkey and Iran – was packed into dozens of metal filing cabinets
and trucked to a safe house in Aleppo’s city centre. The survival of this
unique collection remains uncertain.

Employees without the means to flee crisis have preserved the facility, at
considerable risk to themselves. In this, they are like the staff of the
Vavilov Research Institute in Russia who would rather starve during the
Siege of Leningrad than consume or surrender the seeds they guarded.

ICARDA’s effort is itself a result of previous conflicts. In 2002, the
American war in Afghanistan destroyed the national seed bank in Kabul, and
looters completed the destruction unfinished by combat. ICARDA’s collection
holds seeds salvaged from Iraq’s national seed bank in Abu Ghraib. These
are among the collections duplicated in Svalbard.

Founded in 1977, ICARDA’s headquarters were originally in Lebanon, but the
Lebanese civil war compelled Syria’s former president Hafez al-Assad to
invite the seed bank to establish itself in Syria, hoping it would help the
country increase crop yields. Forty years later, drought and increasing
fuel prices plunged Syria’s agriculture into crisis, and Syrian farmers
became some of the Assad regime’s fiercest opponents.

Observers applaud ICARDA staff for anticipating threats to its seed bank
from conflict and other disasters. Indeed, since 1985, ICARDA has
duplicated its collections in seed banks abroad, and made continuous use of
regional facilities in Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco. Since 2008, ICARDA
staff sent 116,475 additional samples to the Svalbard seed vault.

Despite such heroism, the occupation in Tal Hadya is a reminder of the
limits of institutions conceived as safeguards against natural and
human-made disaster. The intended failsafe for cryogenic conservation is
Svalbard. This great passive house of cold storage represents the hope
that, long past the failure of human energy systems, the ice caps will
preserve biodiversity threatened by development and conflict.

Yet seed banks are not magic reservoirs that can restore ruined countries –
much less ecologies – to prosperity. The destruction of Iraq’s seed bank in
Abu Ghraib in 2003, and the subsequent domination of Iraqi agricultural
reconstruction by US agribusiness interests, provides a cautionary tale.
Here, destruction and reconstruction occurred over a decade rather than a
millennium, transforming rural economies. When war ravages a country, the
continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers might
keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for
generations because they lack the resources for reconstruction.

By preserving agriculture’s deep past, seed banks allow the possibility of
a future. But they don’t dictate the terms of that future. Governments, the
agencies and NGOs that support them and the businesses with whom they work
are the ones that decide agriculture’s future, including how to exploit
preserved seed stocks.

In Syria, gargantuan energy systems created to preserve life have been
repurposed to extinguish it. Perhaps the seeds are safe. We can admire
those who saved them, and we can value seeds as artefacts of cultural
heritage and ancient history – but we should not fetishise them at the
expense of their cultivators who still lack safety, security and free
passage from destruction.



  • [permaculture] The Syrian seed bank that keeps going despite the war | Aeon Ideas, Lawrence London, 12/27/2016

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