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Rabat – Morocco has welcomed reporters from tech-oriented news outlet Freethink to tour what the daily labeled as its “doomsday seed vault,” the climate change-focused gene bank of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).
ICARDA provided the international outlet with access to the gene bank which Freethink described as “one of the largest collections of seeds in the world,” and “a collection that may hold the key to our survival.”
“The world is sick, farmers are losing the capacity to farm,“ ICARDA’s Senior Scientist Dr Filippo Bassi told Freethink, describing climate change as an “uncontrollable beast.” In a short video, Freethink outlined the importance of preserving seeds amid an increasingly volatile global ecosystem.
As part of its “just might work” feature series, Freethink highlighted how the ICARDA project aims to ensure a future for human agriculture even amid an increasingly dangerous climate crisis.
At the ICARDA Research Farm in Marchouch, Freethink saw the state-of-the-art facility that is part of Morocco’s broader efforts to have a meaningful and sustainable impact on global farming. Moroccan officials had previously allowed a brief glimpse at the internal workings of the high-tech gene bank during the inauguration of the center in May.
Morocco has long aimed to play a meaningful role in seed conservation, as Lebanon-based ICARDA moved 38,000 seed samples from its seed bank in Aleppo to Morocco and Lebanon in 2015.
Morocco’s seed preservation efforts are just one part of its multi-pronged approach to agricultural innovation. The country’s fertilizer giant OCP Group is spearheading several high-tech initiatives and fundamental knowledge-sharing efforts through its premier knowledge institute, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.
