ICARDA and Svalbard Global Seed Vault

ICARDA has sent between 2008 and 2014 a total of 116,476 accessions (80% of the in-trust collection held in Syria) for long-term conservation at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV). 

ICARDA in 2015 has decided to relocate the genetic resources activities to Lebanon and Morocco, where it has launched intensive regeneration and characterization efforts to reconstruct its active and base collections from the accessions retrieved from SGSV.

All accessions safety duplicated at SGSV were withdrawn with the last retrieval of 24,049 accessions done in September 2019.

Table 1: Number of accessions of different taxa held at ICARDA genebank in Syria deposited at and retrieved from Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Based on the agreement with SGSV and the Genebank Platform, all accessions regenerated

should be sent as second level of safety duplication at SGSV established by Norway. Sofar, a total of 71,229 accessions were sent to SGSV since 2017. The latest shipment was sent on 14 October 2019 containing 28,500 accessions (9,560 accessions sent from Lebanon and 18,940  accessions from Morocco).