MONGABAY (20/9/2022)
Sitting cross-legged in the summer sun, Fatima collects seedpods from fava beans in Terbol, a quiet village surrounded by cypress trees and vineyards in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. “It’s my first day here,” she says as she smiles shyly, glancing over the hills she had to cross with her family to flee war in Syria almost a decade earlier.
The Syrian border is just a few miles away, behind the hills that surround a group of Syrian women wearing bright-colored dresses and carefully handling fava bean plants. Their painstaking labor saving seeds is a crucial part of efforts by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) to preserve genetic diversity and breed climate-resilient varieties of staple crops to improve livelihoods and strengthen food security.
Like Fatima, the research center used to be based in the Syrian countryside. But when war made it increasingly difficult to operate in the Aleppo region, where ICARDA had been located since 1977, the organization had to be moved to Lebanon and Morocco. The Beqaa Valley, with climatic zones varying from Mediterranean to semiarid, proved to be the ideal place to continue the work breeding and testing crops for tolerance to drought and heat stress, and resistance to diseases and pests.
The young women sitting in circles picking fava bean pods don’t know where the seeds they hold in their hands will end up: in a cold storage room, or a field warmed by the sun? Some of the seeds collected by these migrant workers, mostly Syrian women, have ended up as far as the Arctic, in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores seeds from all over the world to provide a backup in case there is a disaster.
In 2015, ICARDA was in the news for being the first depositor of seeds to make a withdrawal from the vault burrowed into a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Before the war, ICARDA’s gene bank in Aleppo held one of the world’s largest collections of crop diversity from the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of staples like wheat, barley, lentils and chickpeas (…)