Something Worth Fighting for: ICARDA's Next Chapter

Text by Cierra Martin, Photo and Video by Shawn Landersz

There is an ancient proverb that says, "When you lose your roof, you win the stars."

Sometimes even amidst the gravest of circumstances, promise blooms. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), headquartered in Aleppo, Syria since 1975, was forced to abandon its genebank due to the ongoing Syrian war last October.

Today, ICARDA’s collection finds not one but two new homes in Morocco and Lebanon. The construction of the new genebanks is finalized at the same time that backup seeds, which came from the first-ever withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, are harvested in the fields and ready for cold storage in the new facilities.

Even before the war affected the city of Aleppo, ICARDA’s team sprang into action. They completed the duplication of over 85% of their collections in neighboring centers as well as in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

But by Spring of 2012, the situation in Syria began to deteriorate. With the realization that Aleppo would soon be affected, ICARDA’s senior management decided to decentralize their activities. In July of that same year, the international staff at ICARDA and their families were forced to leave the country to Lebanon, and with them went the remaining seeds that had yet to be safety duplicated.

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