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.
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