SPECIAL FEATURE
PROFILE: SARADA KRISHNAN Sarada Krishnan is Director of Programs at the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Bonn, Germany, where she oversees the planning, development and implementation of the overall technical framework of the organization. She holds a PhD in Conservation Biology from the University of Colorado Boulder, USA.
was able to survive three successive droughts from 2018 to 2020 when many other varieties failed. Known as Jabal durum wheat, the hybrid wheat variety derived from this wild species could feed human populations far into the future amid deepening climate change and worsening droughts. Fortunately, Syria’s collection had been fully “backed up”, thousands of miles away at the iconic Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the Norwegian Arctic Circle – humanity’s ultimate insurance policy for biodiversity and food security. The safety duplication of these seeds allowed for their retrieval and then establishment of new collections in Lebanon and Morocco, enabling important research to continue. To better understand the current state of play and the long- run issues at stake, we
F ood security shot to the top of the global agenda following Russia’s war in Ukraine in early 2022 as staple exports were blocked and prices soared. Several million people have since become refugees, either internally or internationally. Also on the move was the Ukrainian national collection of 150,000 plants and seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and sunflower held in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city in the east of the country. “As the conflict intensified, scientists from around the world contacted [us] to sound the alarm on Ukraine’s main national seed collection held in Kharkiv,” said Kent Nnadozie, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “This unique collection is of global value for the future of food security and sustainable agriculture, and if lost then it is gone forever.” Yet this was not the first time that conflict has threatened our collective food security. Everyone knows about
the horrific war in Syria, but few have heard about the country’s seed bank, which was wiped out amid fierce fighting in Aleppo. That collection contained thousands of culturally important seed varieties, as well as many more “wild cousins” – including a species of wheat particularly resistant to drought. That species was recently used to develop a variety of wheat that
spoke with Sarada Krishnan, Director of Programs at the Global Crop Diversity Trust (also known as the Crop Trust).
Kharkiv's national seed collection is of global value for the future of food security and sustainable agriculture.
Kent Nnadozie, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
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