Earth Equity News

Seed Hunter Searches for Ancient Seed Types to Ease Future Food Shortages. By Andrew Trounson, The Austalian, September 6, 2008. "In a clapped-out Russian four-wheel drive, up a mountainside in Tajikistan, scientist and seed curator Ken Street found a village that time had forgotten. It had no power, no running water, was desperately poor and had no modern seed crops. It was just what he was looking for. Rugged, remote central Asian villages are among the few places still to have the ancient seed types that will be crucial if we are to keep ourselves fed by adapting ourvulnerable essential crops to withstand the rigours of warming temperatures, new pests and diseases. Working for the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas [ICARDA] in Syria's ancient city of Aleppo, Dr Street regularly ventures into the wilds of Turkey, Armenia and the central Asian 'stans' on seed collection missions. He has to brave corrupt police, deadly mountain roads, the occasional robber baron, and even in one case a mine field. When the world is losing a crop variety to extinction every day, there is little room for complacency because the next variety we lose may well have held the genetic answer to adapting a key crop to the higher temperatures heading our way. 'The genetic variations are the best tools we have to deal with what is coming,' Dr Street said."