*[Enwl-eng] Refugee Seeds

[enwl]

The Middle East conflict threatens to displace some of the world's most 
desert-adapted seeds.





                                News of the world environment


                                 NEWSLETTER | JANUARY 3, 2025

























                                Refugee Seeds

                                WHERE MY FAMILY is from on the Lebanon-Syria 
border in the arid Bekaa Valley, wave after wave of armed conflicts over 
millennia have decimated rural families, destroyed their food supplies, seed 
stores, and irrigation canals, forcing many of the survivors to flee as 
refugees to other lands.

                                A century ago, my grandparents, aunts, and 
uncles fled the Bekaa Valley during the Ottoman War, when drought, locust 
plagues, and mulberry crop failures simultaneously impacted their 
livelihoods and food security. They arrived as undocumented refugees in the 
United States on routes that took them through Ellis Island, Windsor, 
Ontario, or El Paso-Juarez after to sailing across the Atlantic to the 
Eastern Seaboard, St. Lawrence River, or Yucatan Peninsula.

                                Most of us know or have heard of farmers, 
herders, and orchard-keepers like my kin who have had to escape from wars 
and climate change. But how many of us recognize that along with their 
displacement from the homelands, “refugee seeds” are generated as well?

                                During most wars, rural communities have 
suffered insults on top of grave injuries: While grieving the loss of family 
members and destruction of their properties, the seed stocks they need to 
recover are often damaged or destroyed as well.

                                A century ago, agricultural scientists 
devised a “back-up” system to help farmers safeguard and recover their 
heirloom seeds under such circumstances: seed banks. By collectively placing 
seeds in a reserve where they were protected from the elements and from 
military conflicts, farmers could take seeds from the bank after a disaster 
and move toward recovery much more rapidly.

                                Because of their capacity to help humanity 
after wars, floods, droughts, or famine, the seed banks — like hospitals and 
places of spiritual renewal — were considered sacrosanct. They were 
envisioned as demilitarized sanctuaries that were meant to be kept safe 
during times of internecine strife.

                                That isn’t happening in the current war in 
the Middle East, where “scorched earth” strategies that have been used for 
centuries to starve and cripple adversaries are being used extensively.



                                Political ecologist and ethnobotanist Gary 
Paul Nabhan writes about how the war in the Middle East threatens to force 
some of the most desert-adapted seed collections in the world into “refugee 
status”in this Winter print magazine feature.


                              READ MORE

                                Photo by Michael Major/Crop Trust







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From: Editors, Earth Island Journal <editor at earthisland.org>
Date: сб, 4 янв. 2025 г., 3:45
Subject: Refugee Seeds

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