The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, is a research body which focuses on the food security concerns specific to dry parts of the world. Until recently, this kind of research also took place in Syria. They do this by growing old plants, and examining them for traits of potential use to today’s agriculture. So crop plant biologists all over the world work hard to identify important traits. Or, it might produce a grain high in a particular vitamin, again, really important if we’re to ensure that everyone in the world is well nourished by the foods they eat. For example, that old wheat plant might be very good at tolerating drought, a trait which could be vital if rainfall patterns change. An old wheat plant, for example, might produce a very low yield of low quality grain but yet have an adaptation which would be helpful to the plants we grow today. So while an old crop variety as a whole might not be very useful to today’s food production, there might be within it a trait that could be useful. Rather than seeing these plants as whole, coherent varieties, plant scientists increasingly see them as big bundles of genetic traits. However, and perhaps surprisingly, these old plant varieties could be key to our future global food security. Harder still to see the use of a crop wild relative. It’s hard to imagine an out-of-date crop being useful. Twenty-first century agriculture is the most productive in human history. And on the face of it, that does seem to make sense. There’s a tendency by some to look at the crops that were grown in the past as out of date or obsolete. This is something agricultural biodiversity has the potential to help with. Questions are being asked like, ‘in the future, will we have enough food?’, ‘will climate change make it more difficult to grow the food in the locations where it has typically been grown?’, and even, ‘will the food we grow provide adequate nutrition to keep those who eat it healthy’? In a time of a growing global population, as well as significant environmental change, concern is increasing about the future security of the world’s food supplies. These are the wild plants that food crop plants were bred from. And, second, the so-called ‘crop wild relatives’. First, the plants which have been selectively bred into food crops by people. But it’s the area’s agricultural biodiversity that we’re particularly interested. This means that a huge range of plants grow here. As a result, it’s home to enormous levels of plant biological diversity, known as biodiversity. More importantly, it’s a very diverse landscape, with a considerable range of different environments all crammed into a relatively small area. As its name suggests, this arc of land is a place where plant life grows in abundance. Syria is a country in a region of the world known by biologists as the ‘fertile crescent’. But far less reported, is war’s environmental or biological consequences. The immediate human cost of war is something we often see in the news. So we start in Syria, a place which has been the site of intense armed conflict and political and social instability. The events I’ll describe connect the human world of science and politics, and the non-human world of material objects and other living things like plants, in a way that only a subject like Geography can do. This case captures, for me, what makes Geography such an exciting subject to work in and study. I’m going to examine how conflict in the Middle East risked disrupting research into the future security of the world’s food supplies, and find out how a revolutionary project on the remote island of Spitsbergen acted to keep that research going. I’m a PhD graduate of The Open University’s Department of Geography where I currently work as a Research Associate.
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