Refugee farmers and farmworkers have had to escape from wars and civil unrest all over the world. But now along with human displacement from their homelands, refugee seeds are being generated as well.
As a Lebanese American agricultural botanist who has collaborated for five decades with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and seed banks in five countries, I fear that the conflict in the Middle East is on the verge of destroying or displacing thousands of seed accessions of grains, legumes, and other food crops, and wounding the courageous people who have struggled to maintain this crop diversity for humanity.
Where my family is from on the Lebanon-Syria border in the arid Bekaa Valley, wave after wave of armed conflict over millennia have decimated the populations in rural villages, destroyed their food supplies, and forced many of the survivors to flee as refugees to other lands.
Such tragedies are not mere abstractions for me. A century ago, my own grandparents, aunts, and uncles fled the Bekaa Valley during the Ottoman War. They were forced to flee from forced conscription by the Ottoman army that wanted them to fight against the own people. But they were already exhausted and impoverished from grappling with drought, locust plagues, and mulberry crop failures that crippled the silk industry.
They arrived as undocumented refugees in the United States on routes that took them through Ellis Island, Windsor, Ontario, or El Paso-Juarez after sailing across the Atlantic to the Eastern Seaboard, St. Lawrence River, or Yucatan Peninsula.
Nevertheless, something seems profoundly different and horribly aggravated with the current conflict between Israel and Iran that is now disrupting life in at least seven countries in the Middle East. The difference this time around is that the “scorched earth” strategies that have been used for centuries to stun, starve, and slaughter adversaries have been taken to new heights (or depths). Not only have fields been burned, waters contaminated, power and water infrastructures sabotaged, but hospitals, schools, seed banks and food relief convoys have been destroyed. This violence has left doctors, teachers, seed bank stewards, Red Cross EMTs and World Central Kitchen workers fleeing—or worse, being wounded or killed.
And now—as if those horrors to humankind in Israel, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon were not enough—one of the world’s most valued repositories of seeds for food biodiversity is being threatened. Aerial photos and on-the-ground reports document that missiles have struck within 6 kilometers of at least one of the five facilities of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) scattered across the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. These facilities are critical to the conservation and regeneration of crops of value to all of humanity, including barleys, chickpeas, lentils and grass peas (also known as chickling vetches or cicerchias).
Missiles have already hit Lebanon near several of the Lebanese, Armenian, Palestinian, and Iraqi villages, and refugee camps were some of ICARDA’s agricultural, administrative, maintenance and security staff members reside. Although there are no reports yet that the ICARDA seed bank facilities have suffered direct hits, electrical and water delivery systems vital to the facilities and their staff have been demolished throughout the Bekaa Valley. The severity and proximity of strikes in the Bekaa is still accelerating, to the point that workers in the Lebanese government and international and NGO facilities have been advised to either stay home or escape to the northernmost reaches of Lebanon.
This crisis threatens to be but one more twisted turn in a cycle of destruction of facility destruction, infrastructure collapse, and disruption to dedicated staff members that has resulted in some of the same food crop seeds being moved multiple times. They were looted and then partially recovered in the Afghanistan cities of Ghazni and Jalalabad, then moved to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, then to Tal Hayda near Aleppo Syria, to the Svalbard doomsday vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, and finally to the Bekaa in Lebanon.
In short, the current conflict in the Middle East is putting at risk some of the most desert-adapted seed collections in the world, and as such, it is threatening to force them into refugee status for a fifth episode. And as other scientists and journalists have reported after each prior episode of forced emigration of seeds, such violence can tangibly endanger both the seeds themselves and the and trial experiments that demonstrate where and how these arid-adapted crop varieties can be best utilized by farmers with few other resources available to them.
These are most certainly plant resources that humanity will need to recruit as we all face the hotter, drier climates of the future world that I call Planet Desert.
I personally grieve that these seeds are being threatened once again, because I have worked collaboratively with plant conservationists from other countries to safeguard and replenish stores of these often-forgotten crop varieties. Many of the rare crop varieties held in ICARDA seed banks already tolerate extreme heat, drought, solar radiation, and salinity stress. But my fears are even more personal than that.
Three of my Lebanese cousins have worked at the ICARDA facility in the Bekaa in the past, and I have visited them whenever I return to our ancestral village. What’s more, at least three hundred selections of seeds collected by my mentor in plant exploration-Howard Scott Gentry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture arrived at an ICARDA seed bank the very day that I arrived there as well.
They had originally been collected by Howard and in-country colleagues in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s as part of UN-sponsored collaborations to improve food security in drought-stricken regions. And I have personally, however briefly, assisted with harvests at the American Beirut University experimental farm in the Bekaa Valley where some of these seed stocks were being regenerated while I was in residence there. I was also blessed to have spent time with ICARDA’s board there, listening to the Syria delegates painfully describe the effects of war on their own valiant efforts.
While these seed banks have been regarded by crop scientists as an irreplaceable resource for arid lands agriculture for decades, the recent conflict is not demonstrating the respect and restraint required to ensure that these resources will be available to people in the future.
This is not the first time that these rivals have acted with wanton disrespect for the globally significant crop resources being protected and regenerated in the Bekaa. In an earlier conflict—well before the ICARDA seed bank was built—missile fire raged just above the seed regeneration fields at one of ICARDA’s its agricultural field station. Those attacks also destroyed irrigation infrastructure in the Litany River Valley, leaving many fields of seed crops high and dry just before harvest, as attacks are doing once again.
Since 2016 when the ICARDA seed bank was inaugurated there, close to 25,000 distinct kinds of seeds have been regenerated to keep them viable for future use. But now the network of agricultural experiment stations in the Bekaa—not just the seed banks themselves—are imperiled.
That is ironic, because for the last 15 years, the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon seemed like a “safe harbor” for these food crop reserves, compared to the horrors that took place around seed banks near Ghazni, Jalalabad, Abu-Ghraib and Tal-Hayda in Syria. But now “the refugee seeds” in the Bekaa of Lebanon are surrounded by 1.5 million refugees and a million of internally displaced Lebanese, most of whom have had to flee their homes since mid-September.
If there is any answer at all that U.S. Secretary of State Blinken of the U.S. and Filippo Grandi of the United Nations HCR should persuade both Israel and Hezbollah to adopt, it would be an immediate 20-kilometer diameter demilitarized zone around any seed bank. U.N. peace-keeping forces should be enlisted to guard these areas.
That may not stop the fighting nor immediately diminish the number of human deaths and casualties, but it could establish a precautionary precedent. It also might offer future generations of Middle Easterners-and their refugees abroad—the food and medicinal plants that could help them heal from one more senseless, vicious cycle of conflict in a proxy war between global powers. In a very real sense, all of us have a stake in seeing that this crop diversity survives, because it is the source of foods and medicines that we all may need to rely upon in the future.
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Photo courtesy of AJ Photography, Unsplash
