The Arctic Global Doomsday Seed Vault saw its very first withdrawal when thousands of seeds were successfully delivered to Morocco and Lebanon, officials announced Monday. The request for seeds was made in September by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), as previously reported by HNGN.
The seed samples sent to research stations in the two Middle Eastern countries amounted to at least 38,000 samples that included wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea seeds, according to an Associated Press report. They were shipped last month from the global seed vault, located in Norway's Svalbard region.
"It just shows that the global system of fail-safe backup works," said Michael Koch, a representative from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the administrator of the seed vault, in the Associated Press report. "We wanted to make sure that the publicity around this deposit is not taken by someone for different purposes."
ICARDA withdrew its deposit from the seed vault due to the on-going war in Syria, which has already killed at least 250,000 people and displaced millions more. Incidentally, the seeds taken out had previously been stored in Syria's own regional bank in Aleppo, which has since become a site of bloody conflict.
The regional seed bank in Syria claims that it is no longer capable of growing seeds and distributing them to other countries, HNGN reported. It has since relocated its headquarters from the original Aleppo site. The city was an important site for ICARDA's initiatives because it helped new strains of drought and heat-resistant wheat to develop and thrive, according to the Inquistr.
