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Seeds of Syria: How a birthplace of agriculture lost troves of its native crops, and why we should all worry

Home to the wild ancestors of our most important crops, Syria once hosted one of the world’s biggest seed banks and grew several native varieties of wheat. But this collapsed during the war, and Syrians are now struggling to find good-quality seeds. How did the country lose its seed treasure, and with it, a wealth of genetic resources for humanity?


28 October 2022

AL-HASAKAH — In a small coffee shop in downtown Hasakah city, northeastern Syria, Mahmoud Muhammad’s eyes flicker with energy as he recounts the early days of 2013. 

The Syrian regime was pulling out, abandoning its offices and institutions to a nascent coalition of armed groups and independent political parties—led by Kurds, Syriacs and Arabs from the area—that would eventually morph into the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), the de facto government still ruling the region. While all eyes turned to the raging war between the Syrian state and opposition groups, as well as emerging jihadist influence in the Syrian desert, Muhammad was fighting on another front. 

“It was the very beginning of a new era, and we were trying to preserve the resources we had at hand,” Muhammad said, his expressive face broken by a broad smile. “It was a very important matter, a matter of food security and food sovereignty.”

“Keep in mind this was wartime—nobody was preoccupied with the issue of seeds.”

For days on end, he and other agricultural engineers crisscrossed northeastern Syria to salvage wheat seeds, visiting agricultural research centers, seed multiplication organizations, and contracted seed breeders. Their efforts would give birth to the Agricultural Community Development Company (KPJ), established in the early years of the war to fill the void left by regime institutions. Muhammad, who requested a pseudonym due to security concerns, was among its founders. 

“Keep in mind this was wartime—nobody was preoccupied with the issue of seeds,” Muhammad said. “But really, if not for what we managed to do in those days, the agricultural crisis we are in now would be much worse. Without the resources collected then, we would not have been able to distribute seeds, plant them and feed people for so long.”

But, as Muhammad knows all too well, these efforts are reaching their limits. 

In a strange twist of the threads of history, Syria—home to ancient varieties of wild wheat and barley, the cradle where humans first discovered the extraordinary potential of cereals and learned to harvest, plant and nurture grain—is struggling to grow its own wheat. 

In 2021, the harvest plummeted to just above one million tons, compared to 2.8 million tons in 2020 and more than 4 million tons a year before the war. Across Syria, farmers report dwindling yields, which they attribute to a lack of rain, fertilizers and irrigation capacity—but also to the declining quality of seeds. 

Syria was once home to world-renowned agricultural research centers and one of the world’s largest seed banks, hosting thousands of native cereals and wild plants. But war scattered these resources, and the seeds that were rescued nearly 10 years ago and repeatedly reproduced ever since are now reaching exhaustion. Institutions in charge of growing and distributing them lack the expertise and means to carry out their mission. At the same time, the climate is changing, and varieties developed decades ago can no longer meet the needs of farmers, who struggle to adapt to rapid changes in weather patterns and rainfall.

The story of Syria’s seeds is interwoven with that of its people and institutions. How did a nation once self-sufficient in cereals lose the means to produce them, leaving farmers empty-handed to face a changing climate and worsening droughts? And how did a once bountiful and diverse trove of genetic material shrivel to a few exhausted varieties?

Part I: Losing ground

The impact of climate change is now perceptible in Syria’s northeast, which is now about 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter than it was a century ago. Precipitation has also decreased, particularly in the past two years, amid a historic drought.

But climate change has also become a convenient scapegoat. In Iraq and Syria, political leaders eagerly point to plummeting rainfall as the main, inescapable source of farmers’ woes. Undoubtedly, rising temperatures and decreasing precipitation has hugely affected rainfed crops, decreased access to water for irrigation and compounded other challenges.

A closer look into Syrian agriculture shows that the seeds of its current decline were sown decades before the first impacts of climate change were felt—a decline that has more to do with shortsighted decisions and human-induced crises than with a few years of drought.

“If rain doesn’t come this year, we will not be able to plant.” Amal, a local farmer, stands near the spring-fed washhouse of Mashoq village on the outskirts of Qamishli, 27/09/2022 (Lyse Mauvais)

World-renowned institutions

In the 1960s, the Baath party rose to power in Syria with a political obsession: improving agricultural yields to ensure self-sufficiency, the prerequisite for a strong and sovereign state. 

Historically, farmers in Syria and around the world grew landraces: local crop varieties selected and bred by farmers themselves. But since scientific plant breeding emerged in the nineteenth century, many countries have set their sights on producing “improved” varieties, selected more systematically, that can be reproduced and distributed on a wider scale. A “variety” is a population of individual plants from the same crop that have been selected for their common properties. They may have a certain height or color, a high yield or be well-adapted to a particular environment. 

To this end, Syrian leaders established powerful institutions tasked with modernizing the agricultural sector. The country’s first scientific plant breeding program started in the 1960s with the establishment of the Department of Agricultural and Scientific Research (DASR) under the Ministry of Agriculture, and other state programs such as the government-operated Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (SMAAR) seed bank in Douma.

Independent research centers were also invited to Syria to develop high-yield seed varieties. By 2011, two major institutions operated in the country: the Arab Center for the Study of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD)—founded in Damascus in 1968—and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which was founded in 1977 in Lebanon but moved to Syria during the Lebanese civil war. 

The UN-affiliated ICARDA was tasked with developing key food crop varieties, such as barley and lentils, for developing countries, and wheat varieties for the Middle East and North Africa. As one of the top 15 agricultural research centers worldwide, it was one of the crown jewels of the Assad regime, which provided it with 1,000 hectares of land near the town of Tel Hadya in the Aleppo countryside. In exchange, ICARDA was expected to develop improved varieties well-adapted to the Syrian context.

And for the first few decades, this partnership succeeded. Between 1977 and 2011, Syria’s DASR approved and released more than 18 wheat varieties, many developed in partnership with ICARDA and ACSAD. Those varieties, developed until 2011, bear names that evoke their birthplace—Cham, Bohouth, Douma—and are still widely used by Syrian farmers today.

‘A difficult marriage’

Despite these apparent successes, “from the beginning, it was a difficult marriage,” recalled Dr. Salvatore Ceccarelli, a geneticist and plant breeder who worked with ICARDA in Syria from 1980 to 2011.

As a strategic element of Syria’s agricultural policy, the development and release of new crop varieties was tightly controlled and centralized. Researchers could not provide seeds to farmers directly, only to the state. The DASR “would conduct trials in various areas, and based on the results, they would decide whether the variety would be made available to farmers,” Ceccarelli added.

“The policy of the government was somehow to forget about [arid and semi-arid] areas, and to produce all they needed in the wetter parts of Syria”

The work was also impacted by competition between different research centers, as well as a growing rift between government officials focused on improving yields in line with the national policy towards self-sufficiency, and independent experts with very different research interests.

The policy of Syria’s DASR “was somehow to forget about [arid and semi-arid] areas, and to produce all they needed in the wetter parts of Syria,” Ceccarelli remarked. “I of course disagreed with this, because they did not understand the ecological importance of farming in dry areas, as a sort of barrier to the desert.” 

Ceccarelli’s research focused on barley, a rainfed crop that can grow in particularly harsh environments, and is often cultivated on dry, marginal land by farmers, usually for animal feed. To develop varieties adapted to these conditions, Ceccarelli started providing farmers with a range of high-quality seeds from ICARDA’s breeding program, asking them to plant them in the same field and select the plants that fared best.

This participatory approach quickly came into conflict with the Syrian government’s modernization policies. In 2008, Ceccarelli had to significantly downsize his research following direct pressure from the Ministry of Agriculture, which he says accused him of “threatening national food security.” 

A centralized system

Ceccarelli views his own experience as illustrative of how Syrian authorities managed seeds at the time, by tightly controlling them from inception to distribution.

“My main objective was to provide farmers in different areas of Syria with the best variety adapted to their area, while the philosophy of the Syrian government was to plant the same variety all across Syria,” Ceccarelli said. “It is much easier to produce and control a large amount of seeds from a few varieties, than small amounts of seeds from many varieties.”

Once a new variety was launched, seeds were distributed to farmers by the General Organization for Seed Multiplication (GOSM), a state organization established in 1976 as the sole supplier of certified seeds. From 1994 to 1999, wheat accounted for 94 percent of the roughly 170,000 tons of agricultural crop seeds GOSM distributed each year. And by the early 2000s, the organization claimed to provide up to 300,000 tons of certified wheat seeds to Syrian farmers yearly.

A vast network of agricultural centers across Syria managed the distribution of seeds, while also promoting new farming methods, irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. From the 1980s onwards, this aggressive government strategy led to the fast-paced modernization of agriculture, complete with the mass adoption of machinery and fertilizers. 

The GOSM administered an extensive network of grain silos, like this one in Qamishli, in Hasakah province, northeastern Syria, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

Improved seed varieties were sold at a subsidized price to encourage farmers to renew their stock on a frequent basis. Pushed by droughts and crop failures, and tempted by the promise of higher yields, farmers abandoned their landrace seeds. The proportion of Syrian wheat fields planted with modern varieties increased, from eight percent in 1973 to 55 percent in 1977 and 100 percent by the late 1990s. 

Staggering success

At first, Syria’s agricultural transformation was applauded by scientists and policymakers, who were chiefly concerned with increasing food security in a world marked by skyrocketing population growth and catastrophic famines. 

“Within a short period the country has become self-sufficient in wheat, producing surpluses for export in good years.”

“Awareness and adoption of modern wheat varieties and associated technologies has increased spectacularly [in Syria],” one research paper remarked in 2011. By 1999, 87 percent of wheat farmers grew modern varieties, 99.5 percent applied commercial fertilizers, and more than 90 percent used pesticides and chemical treatments to improve the survival rate of seeds. “Within a short period the country has become self-sufficient in wheat, producing surpluses for export in good years,” researchers added.

These wheat seeds, stored at the GOSM’s seed multiplication center in Qamishli, will be sowed by farmers at the beginning of the rainy season in November, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

These wheat seeds, stored at the GOSM’s seed multiplication center in Qamishli, will be sowed by farmers at the beginning of the rainy season in November, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

But this fast-paced growth in productivity had drawbacks. It increased dependence on a centralized agricultural supply system, which was designed not to support the resilience of small and mid-sized farmers, but to boost yields.

Much like Ceccarelli’s locally-selected barley varieties, the sturdy landraces planted by local farmers for centuries were pushed aside to ensure a centralized, reliable supply of seeds controlled by the Syrian government. 

But many of the modern varieties that replaced them were designed to succeed in “improved” conditions: in irrigated or more fertile parts of Syria, and on fertilized and chemically treated fields. Most were not suited for the extreme natural conditions their ancestors faced, and required a constant flow of inputs, leaving farmers reliant on state-controlled markets once they gave up their own landraces.

The collapse

By the time the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, ICARDA had installed several experimental campuses across Syria, and its headquarters in Tel Hadya near Aleppo hosted around 1,000 staff, including many international researchers. It held one of the most important collections of seeds in the world, housing some 150,000 samples from the region—many of them from Syria, but also seeds rescued from conflict-stricken countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In 2012, as revolution was met with brutal repression and descended into chaos, ICARDA withdrew its international staff from Syria. But throughout the first years of the war, its seed bank in Tel Hadya continued to operate, powered by generators keeping its refrigerated vaults at -20 degrees Celsius. The seeds remained and, for as long as possible, Syrian employees continued to operate the facility. Each day, they negotiated their way to the seed bank, which was in an area controlled by various Islamist opposition factions, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, until 2015. 

“What was really original in this seed bank,” Ceccarelli said, “was the presence of wild plants from which our crops originated: wild wheat, wild barley, wild lentils, wild chickpeas.” This precious genetic material—the founding blocks of modern agriculture—was irreplaceable. 

Aware of this, ICARDA had started to duplicate its seed collection in 1985. In 2008, it also began to deposit more than 116,000 samples in the Svalbard Seed Vault, dubbed the “Doomsday Vault” because it is dug into the frozen ground of the Norwegian Arctic to safely harbor copies of all known seeds on Earth. 

So when ICARDA finally left Syria in 2015, the tens of thousands of seeds collected over 40 years of research were not entirely lost. But what was lost were decades of expertise and close partnerships between the international research center and Syrian experts, who formed the backbone of extremely powerful and centralized agricultural institutions.

In 2015, 2017 and 2019, ICARDA gradually withdrew its seeds from the Doomsday Vault and was able to restore its seed bank, now split between various locations across the Middle East. But the Syrian agricultural sector did not recover so easily.

 Syria’s celebrated agricultural success, authors of the 2011 study remarked, hinged “on the existence of a strong wheat seed system where certified seed is available, affordable and regularly used by farmers.” When agricultural institutions and markets, including the GOSM’s centralized seed supply system, fell apart during the war, farmers began to feel the effects of their entrenched dependency. And to their dismay, they soon faced a seed problem.

Part II: Saving seeds

In recent years, harvests of all crops have shriveled across Syria, but the situation of wheat is probably the most dramatic: total production fell by roughly 75 percent between 2011 and 2021, and farmers continue to report declining yields. 

The impact on food security is stark. In 2022, the AANES was able to purchase only 450,000 tons of wheat from farmers, 150,000 tons short of what it needs to feed people in northeastern Syria. The situation is much worse in government-held areas, since most wheat production is located in the northeast, outside the regime’s control.

“We are still planting the varieties developed in the days of the regime, but they no longer give the same results.”

Northeastern Syria, the country’s agricultural powerhouse, is where the fate of Syria’s wheat harvest is decided year after year. But between 2020 and 2021 alone, farmers reported decreases of 17 to 55 percent in yields, according to an October 2021 humanitarian assessment. In Hasakah province, the loss was 50 percent on average. Figures for 2022 are expected to fall within the same range. These numbers are only for irrigated crops, which have been least affected by the ongoing drought. 

While decreasing rainfall is a big concern, farmers increasingly point to worsening seed performance as a main challenge, particularly in Deir e-Zor and Raqqa provinces, where there are fewer markets and agricultural institutions than in Hasakah.

“We are still planting the varieties developed in the days of the regime, but they no longer give the same results,” seed rescuer and KPJ founder Muhammad summarized. “For many years I grew Douma 4, but I recently stopped because its resistance to pests, diseases and weather conditions has decreased. Because of climate change, even seeds that worked well in the past may no longer be suitable to today’s conditions.”

Parallel institutions

When the AANES, the de-facto government in northeastern Syria, formed in November 2013, it chose the wheat sheaf as one of its emblems. Bread is a staple food in Syria, and for as long as people there can recall, fields of wheat covered the country’s vast northeastern plains. 

The fledgling administration reopened agricultural research centers and grain silos abandoned by the Syrian government, and launched its own General Organization for Seed Multiplication (GOSM) to collect, store, multiply and distribute seeds to local farmers, taking over from the KPJ, which remains the most important agricultural company in the area. 

Farmers who register with the AANES’ GOSM can access a limited quantity of subsidized seeds, fertilizers and agricultural credit. In turn, they must sell part of their harvest to AANES grain silos at set prices. The body also contracts with some farmers to multiply seeds, provided they meet criteria such as owning irrigated land that was not planted with wheat or corn in the previous year. 

“Year after year, the number of seed multipliers we contract is increasing,” Mohamed Abdelhamid Younes, the director of Qamishli’s seed multiplication center, told Syria Direct. His center went from 30 contracted farms around Qamishli in 2020 to 80 in 2021, and 164 in 2022. This trend is driven in part by the difficult situation of farmers after two years of drought: contracting with the GOSM is a way to access seeds and inputs on credit. There are thousands more contracted seed multipliers across Hasakah province, where the GOSM is most active.

Seeds stored at the AANES GOSM’s seed multiplication center in Qamishli, northeastern Syria, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

In 2022, according to Younes, the AANES was able to secure 75,000 tons of wheat seeds, enough to cover basic needs. Farmers can also purchase unsubsidized seeds from local markets or their neighbors, and a significant portion—between 30 and 50 percent, according to various studies—reuse seeds stored from the previous harvest. Others receive seed donations from NGOs, which buy them at an unsubsidized price from the AANES to ensure steady quality and avoid disrupting the seed supply.

“This year, we managed to produce an important quantity of wheat seeds, probably enough to cover the needs of irrigated areas, and we hope that next year, we will be able to cover northeastern Syria entirely,” Muhammad al-Dakhil, the co-chair of the AANES’ Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, told Syria Direct. “We have been working for years to reach the level we are at now.”

Others have also understood the crucial importance of a secure seed supply. In northwestern Syria, the Syrian Interim Government (SIG), formed by opposition forces in Aleppo province, established a parallel GOSM in 2013 to import seeds and multiply wheat seeds in opposition-held areas. The SIG’s GOSM currently maintains 17 varieties of wheat and does not develop new ones. In 2017, the organization produced about 9,400 tons of seeds.

The state of agricultural institutions is less clear in Damascus-held parts of Syria. Many pre-war organizations still formally exist but, like empty shells, are disconnected from the country’s main agricultural areas. Most agricultural research centers and silos have been taken over by de facto authorities in areas beyond the reach of Damascus. Still, the state continues to receive support from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In collaboration with ICARDA, in 2019 the FAO contracted an unknown number of seed breeders to multiply seeds on behalf of the regime’s GOSM.

A steady decline

But despite efforts on various sides, Syrian farmers are losing an uphill battle against the natural deterioration of seeds and varieties. Every year, the seeds they have grow a little less effective. Understanding why requires a dive into how seed multiplication works at its various stages.

Like any population of living beings, plant varieties have a natural tendency to diversify. Some “abnormal” individuals appear, others cross with another variety and produce offspring with different characteristics from the two parent populations. 

To ensure that a variety remains true to its original, distinctive traits, a continuous process of selection, sorting and cleaning is necessary. Multiplying the variety—scaling up from a few parent seeds to thousands, then millions and billions of offspring, is a highly controlled process.

The best seeds, from which an entire variety is derived, are known as “nucleus seeds.” These are genetically pure and have not been mixed with other seeds or exposed to an open environment where they could mix with another variety. 

To generate more seeds, researchers plant nucleus seeds under close scientific supervision. The next generation is harvested to obtain “basic” or “foundation” seeds, which are nearly genetically identical to the nucleus seeds, but available in greater numbers. Again, the environment is controlled as much as possible to preserve the variety’s desired properties.

Basic seeds are then planted and harvested on specialized farms, where the process is repeated. At every stage of seed multiplication, the chances that seeds will slightly diverge from the parent seeds, losing their genetic purity or mixing with other varieties, increase. This risk multiplies once seeds leave supervised agricultural research centers and are handed over to external “breeders,” farmers who have been contracted to produce a large quantity of seeds. At this point, the seeds have reached the “registered” stage and can be distributed to mainstream farmers, who produce wheat for consumption. The next and last stage are “certified” seeds, the progeny of “registered” seeds.

To maintain seed quality, best practice is to regularly “refresh” the variety by returning back to the earliest available seed stage and restarting the process to produce basic, registered and certified seeds that more closely resemble the parent population.

“During the war, we have lost the source, the origin of our seeds—especially wheat.”

But in the case of Syria, the foundation of this multiplication process, the nucleus seeds, have been lost. “During the war, we have lost the source, the origin of our seeds—especially wheat,” seed rescuer Muhammad said regretfully.

Seeds sorted, cleaned and packaged by the AANES’ GOSM are about to be distributed to farmers for the 2023 winter season, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

Looking for the origins

“At every agricultural research center there were small seed banks. As soon as the AANES gained control of regime institutions, including agricultural centers, it tried to conserve everything that was there,” one employee at the Qamishli seed multiplication center told Syria Direct

But they were, at best, able to recover basic seeds for a handful of wheat varieties out of 18—no nucleus seeds. Most other varieties are reproduced year after year from certified seeds that may already have diverged significantly from their origins, and whose productivity is steadily declining. 

Some nucleus seeds were almost certainly kept in seed banks by their developers—ICARDA, ACSAD and the DASR—with copies sent to the Svalbard vault for safekeeping before 2015. But as a non-recognized governmental entity, AANES is not entitled to withdraw seeds from Svalbard. As for ICARDA, “we do not have any direct communication with them,” al-Dakhil of the AANES’ Agriculture Ministry said, despite repeated attempts to work with the research center. 

As of 2019, ICARDA still implemented projects in Damascus-held parts of Syria. But it is likely unable or unwilling to work with either the AANES or the Syrian opposition. Syria Direct reached out to ICARDA for comment, but did not receive a response.

The AANES’ GOSM has tried to develop its own varieties in recent years, dubbed “Rojava” after the Kurdish name for Kurdish parts of Syria. But by their own admission, expertise and genetic materials are lacking. “We really hope that direct communication will be established with ICARDA in order to be able to develop and improve new seed varieties,” al-Dakhil said.

Importing seeds?

So far, northeastern Syria’s de facto authorities have resisted the idea of importing wheat seeds. Private traders regularly bring in vegetable seeds, but wheat seed imports have been limited and confined to three or four varieties, in part because of a lack of capacity for quality control. 

“We cannot take the risk of contaminating the remaining Syrian varieties and losing them for good,” Muhammad said. “We will not be able to always import seeds, so we need to preserve the resources that we have.”

Not only are foreign seed varieties less adapted to Syria, they could, if improperly controlled, open the door to foreign diseases, nematodes or genetically modified crops, posing an even greater threat to food security. 

“Our laboratories are not very developed: we can test seed quality based on a number of factors and check for diseases and nematodes, but we don’t have equipment to look into the genetic make-up of the crop,” al-Dakhil added. “We have one lab specialized in DNA testing, but it is not yet operational.”

In one exceptional case, NGOs funded by USAID brought in 3,000 tons of wheat seeds from neighboring Iraq in November 2021. According to sources in the NGO sector, two wheat varieties were distributed to local multipliers in order to adapt them to Syria over the course of several planting seasons. 

NGOs have otherwise refrained from importing wheat seeds, but there may soon be no other solution in sight. “[Syria] needs experience, needs experts, needs labs,” Loren Burhan, the deputy coordinator of the Food Security and Livelihoods Working Group at the NES Forum—a coordination body for international and local NGOs working in Syria—told Syria Direct.  

“I can see that [the AANES GOSM] are getting hopeless now,” she added. “They are thinking of importing wheat seeds, and one day, maybe after five years, we will no longer be talking about local wheat varieties. This is the high risk we face.”

Packaging wheat seeds in Qamishli for the winter 2023 season, 10/10/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

Part III: Re-rooting

Over the past 15 years, since getting married and moving to Mashoq, a small village in the countryside of Qamishli, Amal has never bought a single vegetable. “Not even a single seed of black cumin!” she says proudly.

She grows everything she needs in her garden, on a vegetable plot behind her house and on eight dunums of rented farmland filled with a wide variety of vegetables and herbs: molokhia, cilantro, onions, eggplants, arugula, okra and more. 

At first, Amal’s garden grew mostly out of the generosity of neighbors, who gave her seeds. But since then, like others in the village, each year Amal harvests and stores seeds for the next season, only buying them from the market for certain crops, or when there is nothing to harvest. “I prefer to prepare my own seeds because it is less expensive and generally more successful,” she said.

Amal, a farmer in the village of Mashoq, Hasakah province, northeastern Syria, 27/9/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

Farmers have always played an active role in managing the genetic resources of their crops,   selecting seeds based on their observed properties, the quality of the harvest on a particular plot of land, or their perceived resistance to diseases and drought. From this continuous selection process, hundreds of landraces have emerged that are adapted to specific areas.

But now, decades of intensive agricultural policies, war and economic hardship threaten to erase what remains of Syria’s heirloom seeds. Over time, the rise of commercial varieties has led many to abandon seed selection and preparation for commercial seeds perceived—often rightfully—as more productive and readily available. As farmers stopped producing their own seeds, landraces disappeared faster than ever before—and with them, precious genetic resources.

Losing landraces

Across Syria, the decline of landraces is well under way. A 2022 study carried out by Syrian experts in opposition-held parts of northwestern Syria found that “amongst the 10 wheat landraces that were once widely cultivated, only five were still in use.” The number of legume landraces still used by farmers had dropped from 23 to 11. And only 14 out of 27 previously known vegetable landraces were still grown in the area. 

A few okra pods left on the plant after the harvest in Mashoq, to mature and produce seeds for the next season, 27/9/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

When farmers were asked why they abandoned a particular breed, half said it was because they no longer had seeds. Part of it was also due to war and displacement, which led many farmers to lose their stocks. 

Whatever the cause, farmers’ seeds are quickly being replaced by commercial varieties. Increasingly, these are imported from Turkey and beyond, since Syria’s remaining seed development and distribution infrastructure focuses on wheat. 

“Imported seeds are better than Syrian ones because they are better prepared and chemically treated, so they give a better yield,” one agricultural shop owner in Qamishli said. His shelves include tomato and eggplant seeds from India. 

These seeds are exponentially more expensive than local varieties, their prices subject to increase and the fluctuating exchange rate of the Syrian pound. For 1,000 tomato seeds from India, a farmer in Hasakah pays $24 (around SYP 100,000), compared to a few thousand Syrian pounds for an equivalent amount from Syria.

The seed smugglers

The decline of farmers’ heirloom varieties and the associated loss of genetic crop diversity is an issue of major concern worldwide. 

With the eradication of many landraces, we are not only losing the chance to see, smell and taste crops developed over the course of centuries. We are also losing a trove of genetic material that could one day be used to develop varieties resistant to future diseases and emerging climate conditions, or that have yet-unknown medical properties. 

Who can say how many other secrets lie dormant inside the genes of plants, awaiting discovery?

Take for example Aegilops tauschii, a Syrian wild grass currently being studied by wheat breeders in the United States for its resistance to the Hessian fly, a pest spreading across the US due to climate change. If it had gone extinct in the wild, and if its seeds had not been preserved in ICARDA’s seed bank, Aegilops tauschii may never have been studied, and the genes resistant to the Hessian fly may have been lost forever.

Who can say how many other secrets lie dormant inside the genes of plants, awaiting discovery? 

This is of particular concern in Syria, where, as Ceccarelli recalled, humanity’s most important crops appeared: wild wheat, barley, legumes, nuts and fruits, the basis of our current food system. 

Amal checks on her vegetable garden in the village of Mashoq in Hasakah province, northeastern Syria, 27/09/2022 (Lyse Mauvais/Syria Direct)

Since its creation in 2016, one organic farm school in a country bordering Syria has built a vast collection of landrace seeds—donated by farmers around the world, including Lebanon, Syria, southern Europe and as far as Colombia—and multiplied them.

For several years, the organization smuggled some of these farmers’ seeds across the border to Syria, where a handful of “friends” passed them on to seed multipliers and farmers in Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Raqqa. “Wherever there’s farming, you can find our seeds. Or at least, I’d like to think that,” one of the farm’s co-founders said.

“It’s much easier to send a book to a Syrian farmer over WhatsApp, than a packet of seeds across the border.”

The Syrian government bans independently importing seeds, so activists paid smugglers to ferry them across the border. Once in Syria, those involved in their multiplication and distribution also worked undercover. “I don’t know exactly what kind of risk people faced if they had been caught by the Syrian government with those seeds,” he added. “People always told us it was better to send them small quantities, so we would smuggle them across by the kilo.”

In recent years, “it’s become too difficult to send seeds to Syria, too expensive to pay the smugglers,” he said. But enough seeds have been exchanged over the past years to constitute a small stockpile and reproduce several local varieties. “Now we focus on knowledge production: It’s much easier to send a book [on agroecology] to a Syrian farmer over WhatsApp, than a packet of seeds across the border.”

“Before, no one was importing seeds from outside. The seeds of Syria were enough and fulfilled our needs.”

These activities stem from a deep belief that the global food system, built on intensive forms of agriculture that have proven destructive to soil and ecosystems, is ill-equipped to deal with climate change. In this context, empowering farmers with the knowledge to prepare their own seeds and select their own crops is essential. 

“If we don’t do this, we are all going to die,” the source said. “Solely relying on commercial seeds means losing independence and losing food sovereignty.”

A cautionary tale

“When war ravages a country, the continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers might keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for generations because they lack the resources for reconstruction,” Courtney Fullilove, a history professor, wrote in a 2015 piece about ICARDA’s seed bank—which was still running at the time. 

These cautionary words were full of foresight. Eventually, this is exactly what happened to Syrian farmers: dependent on modern varieties and a centralized seed supply system after decades of aggressive agricultural policies, they have lost access to both over the course of the war.

“Before, no one was importing seeds from outside. The seeds of Syria were enough and fulfilled our needs,” Mahmoud Muhammad, who spent the early years of the war trying to salvage these seeds, lamented. 

But the technical advances and policies that turned Syria into an agricultural powerhouse also sowed the seeds of its dependency today. The same varieties that once promised to free the country from hunger have also made farmers more reliant on fertilizers and irrigation systems that they can no longer afford in wartime. 

And in the breadbasket of Syria, authorities unrecognized by the international community are unable to retrieve their own grains from the shelves of a faraway seed vault in Norway, powerless to act against the deterioration of improved varieties. 

Meanwhile, the aid sector has little more to offer than a band-aid. Imported flour can stave off famine, but it cannot restore the complex agricultural value chains around wheat production, which is steadily declining.

Syria’s bitter harvest is a lesson for those who place blind faith in modernity, and expect a quick fix to pressing issues like global hunger and climate change. Too often, this optimistic view overlooks the vulnerability of the political and economic systems in which these quick fixes are embedded, and without which they become meaningless. 

Amal knows this all too well. What little wealth she has—green fields, children who do not go to bed on an empty stomach—owes as much to luck as to local networks of resilience that successfully sheltered her community when the broader system failed.

*This report was edited on 11/3/2022 in response to security concerns expressed by one source.

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This report was produced with financial support from the European Endowment for Democracy (EED). Its contents are the sole responsibility of Syria Direct.

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