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. | 
