LOS BANOS (Philippines): Locked away in deep freeze in the Philippines, the farm heritage of Iraq and Afghanistan awaits the arrival of a political spring in the bruised nations so that rice fields will once again carpet the battlefields.
Holding the seeds of more than 108,000 varieties of the key grain is a squat, quake-proof laboratory here at the International Rice Research Institute complex south of Manila.
Priceless native crop varieties are among the unmourned casualties every time human conflict or natural disasters ravage the Earth, says Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, a British evolutionary biologist and custodian of the institute’s gene bank set up in 1977.
Iraq, at the heart of the so-called Fertile Crescent where rice has been grown for at least two millennia, would be no different, he added.
“After the end of a war you will find none of the varieties of any kind still in use, and that includes the modern high-yielding varieties and traditional varieties,” Sackville Hamilton tells AFP during a tour of the facility.
“Whenever there’s a civil conflict — Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Cambodia, East Timor — the rural population is displaced and they don’t go through their annual cropping cycles,” institute spokesman Duncan Macintosh says.
“Farmers have to keep seeds year after year to grow the crops. If they’re off fighting wars, they don’t get to do that,” he adds.
After the institute helped spark the ‘Green Revolution’ that boosted yields in the 1970s, its gene bank came to Cambodia’s rescue in 1988, a decade after the bloody 1970s rule of the Khmer Rouge that practically wiped out the agricultural nation’s rice varieties.
“After their civil war we were able to restore to them all the major varieties of rice that originally came from Cambodia that we conserved in this gene bank,” Sackville Hamilton said.—AFP
