Image Source: ICARDA

Deep beneath the permafrost of the Arctic Circle, behind layers of reinforced steel and ice, a new consignment of seeds from ICARDA has joined the world’s most secure agricultural archive—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Known informally as the “Doomsday Vault,” this underground facility now safeguards another 2,707 seed samples representing some of the planet’s hardiest and most underutilized crops.

Among the new entries are faba bean, grasspea, vetch, medicago, wild lentil, wild cicer, and pea—many of them ancient landraces and wild relatives gathered from across the drylands of the Global South. These seeds carry genetic traits that modern agriculture increasingly needs: drought tolerance, pest resistance, and the ability to thrive in nutrient-poor soils. In short, they are built for disruption—whether driven by climate volatility, supply chain collapse, or geopolitical conflict.

The deposit is part of ICARDA’s ongoing strategy to preserve agrobiodiversity not just as an academic exercise, but as a hedge against an uncertain future. A legacy institution under the CGIAR system, ICARDA was one of the first contributors to Svalbard, a decision that proved prescient when conflict forced the evacuation of its Syrian genebank in 2014. Having secured over 80 per cent of its genetic collection in Svalbard before the crisis, ICARDA was able to rebuild from backups, restoring its mission from new regional hubs in Morocco and Lebanon.

The latest deposit coincided with a visit from UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, both of whom were briefed on the significance of ICARDA’s genetic library. In a world where global seed systems have grown increasingly consolidated—focused on a narrow set of crops and traits—ICARDA’s role has become quietly essential.

Its work stands at the nexus of food security, environmental resilience, and geopolitical strategy. By ensuring that crop varieties tailored for extreme conditions are preserved and improved, ICARDA is filling a critical gap left by commercial breeding systems: the need to adapt agriculture not just for profit, but for planetary stability.

The act of sealing these seeds in permafrost is both pragmatic and poetic. With each shipment, ICARDA strengthens a decentralized global insurance policy—one measured not in megabytes or megawatts, but in millennia of biological evolution. In a world racing toward climate uncertainty, this is the kind of long-term thinking that future harvests will depend on.

Because the real question isn’t whether we can grow more food today. It’s whether, decades from now, we’ll still have the tools—and the genetic options—to grow anything at all.