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ICARDA houses more than a hundred and forty thousand accessions, or samples of seeds and other genetically significant plant material. “The system isn’t recognizing the abbreviation.” Eventually, he found the right code: the International Organization for Standardization uses the abbreviation “XK,” because Kosovo is a partially recognized state.
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“There is a problem with the abbreviation of Kosovo,” he said to himself, peering at the screen. Ali Shehadeh, a sixty-six-year-old Syrian plant conservationist, was sitting in a nearby office, entering data about the seeds’ country of origin into his computer. The sound was like waves receding on a rocky beach. When I first visited, on an autumn afternoon in 2019, staff members in the main building were counting, weighing, and sliding seeds into small packets. Its facilities, surrounded by fields of experimental grain, include a laboratory, nurseries, and a gene bank-a storage facility in which tens of thousands of seeds have been carefully saved and catalogued. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.Lines and paragraphs break automatically.ĬAPTCHAThis question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, known as ICARDA, is housed in a cluster of small buildings on a dusty property in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, halfway between Beirut and Damascus.
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The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly. Pacific Northwest after being imported from Poland in 1938. This year it is sending 12,801 samples, including amaranth, once a nutritious grain for Aztecs and Incas and subspecies of barley that took root in the U.S. seed bank is the biggest national contributor to the Svalbard vault. "They have traits such as drought tolerance or ability to withstand pest and disease, which we think will be very valuable in the future in breeding climate-ready varieties." "They are very tough-they have to be to survive," Fowler said. Wild crops-ancient relatives of domesticated crops-are of particular interest because of their resilience to harsh climatic conditions. Samples shipped this year also included wheat from a range of climates and conditions in Armenia and the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan-the first seeds from the two former Soviet republics. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault-sometimes referred to as a doomsday vault-is designed to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes. Another one in Egypt was looted during last year's uprising. He noted that wars destroyed seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I think the events unfolding in Syria obviously underline the importance of having safety duplication outside of a country," he said, adding the facility had not been damaged in the military crackdown on an anti-government uprising. With the shipment from the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, almost its entire collection is now backed up in Svalbard, Fowler told The Associated Press. That represents an estimated three-quarters of the biological diversity of the world's major food crops, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the vault with Norway's government and the Nordic Genetic Resources Center. The latest additions mean that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault-a master backup to the world's other seed banks-has now secured more than 740,000 samples since it opened in a remote Norwegian archipelago in 2008. Chick peas, fava beans and other seeds from a facility in Syria are among the 25,000 new samples being deposited this week in an Arctic seed vault built to protect food crops from wars and natural disasters, officials said on Tuesday.