“The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) has requested the backup seed that they deposited in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to restart their collection away from the horrors of the Syrian Civil War.
“The collection holds some of the world’s most important diversity of Wheat, Barley, Grasspea and other crops. This diversity provides our scientists, breeders and farmers the raw material needed to improve agriculture to overcome the challenges of climatic changes, population growth, pests, and diseases. The Huffington Post published an article on the 22nd of September, covering the pending request of the Syrian CGIAR Genebank ICARDA to retrieve seeds necessary to uphold their collection. The doomsday seed vault on Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago houses the world’s back up supply of seeds to ensure crop diversity. It contains deposits of nearly 865,000 varieties of seeds buried within a mountain in case of catastrophe. Due to Syria’s civil war, it will now allow a withdrawal of its contents for the first time in its existence…Around 500 seeds of each variety are contained within the vault..and the different varieties are key to genetic resistance against potential disease that could affect the world’s major crops.”
•    A global backstop – “The vault hold the seeds of many tens of thousands of varieties of essential food crops such as beans, wheat and rice. In total, the vault now holds seeds of more than 4000 plant species. These seed samples are duplicates of seed sample stores in national, regional and international gene banks.”