The Director of Seeds Organization in the Interim Government, Engineer Mohammad Hassan, told Enab Baladi that the Ministry of Agriculture in the Government is conducting experiments to preserve the wheat strains from being mixed with low-quality ones. In 2018, 12 types, varieties, of Syrian wheat have been planted. Last week, the General Directorate’s research team, who is responsible for follow up, implemented the second phase of its research experiments on varieties through wheat strains breeding and selection programs. To do this, the Syrian Interim Government established the General Directorate of Scientific Agricultural Research. The genetic mixing of Syrian soft and hard varieties of wheat motivated the concerned entities to intervene to preserve, purify and multiply them. Producing New Varieties Demands Massive Resources This triggered the General Organization for Seed Multiplication affiliated to the Syrian Interim Government to launch a project that seeks to preserve the pre-existing varieties from deterioration, according to what Maan Nasser, the Director of the Organization, has told Enab Baladi. The years of war have played a role in destroying local and international agricultural research centers in Syria, which had the responsibility of preserving the Syrian wheat strains. This is the first idea that comes to the mind upon thinking of the Syrian wheat dilemma for there is a secretive deterioration which centralizes on the lack and the loss of some of the local varieties of wheat, a marked decrease in quality and an increase in resorting to a mixing process. However, the war turned Syria into an importing country after it was a self-sufficient one. Carved into an Arctic mountainside, the vault holds more than 860,000 samples, originating from almost every country in the world.Once upon a time, there used to be a strategic wheat yield in Syria. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, pictured before its opening ceremony in 2008, is the Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom. “However, we can now see that the vault, as the ultimate failsafe, works the way it was intended to do.” “In one sense, it would be preferable if we never had to retrieve seeds from the Seed Vault, as a withdrawal signifies that there is a significant problem elsewhere in the world,” Marie Haga, Executive Director of the Crop Trust said in a statement.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust, the organization that runs the Svalbard Vault with the Government of Norway and the regional organization NordGen, says the shipment contained varieties of cereals, wheat, barley, faba beans, lentils and chickpeas that will be planted next year and tested in hopes of developing new strains that can better withstand disease and climate change, and, eventually, be used to help feed a growing global population. It is the first of what will be several shipments over the next few years. Now, researchers have taken 38,000 seeds back out of the vault and on Monday delivered them 3,000 miles to Lebanon and Morocco, where they can continue the research they started in Syria. Rebels took over the area one year into the bloody civil war, and while the nonprofit says the fighters allowed them to continue working, the daily threats from the fighting proved too dangerous, forcing them to shut down.īut before that happened, researchers there were able to safely transfer thousands of seed samples out of the country, some of which were stored in the arctic vault.
The International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, a nonprofit that promotes agricultural development in developing countries, ran a major seed bank near Aleppo, Syria, until 2012. Photo courtesy of the Global Crop Diversity Trust Arni Bragason from NordGen hands a seed box to Athanasios Tsivelikas from the nternational Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.