Wild Relatives

The Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, deep in the Arctic permafrost, contains seeds from all over the world as a backup should a disaster occur. Everywhere in the world, local varieties are gradually being squeezed out by enhanced varieties, so these “heritage” seeds are now being kept in a vault. Wild Relatives traces the long and tortuous path that the Lebanese seeds in this “doomsday vault” took before being re-sown in the Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley.

The seeds had long distances to travel, and so too do the people, often migrants, who work with them. Refugee Syrian women tend to the crops in the fields run by the International Center for Agriculture Research, which in 2012 had to relocate to Lebanon from Aleppo due to the war in Syria. Youssef, a Lebanese farmer, now rents out his land as a camp for Syrian refugees, because “the refugee business is more profitable than agriculture.” And so the journey taken by the seeds exposes the tensions between industry and biodiversity, and between state and individual.