Here is the whole arctile.
SOMALI SEED BANKS HAVE BEEN LOOTED
By Boyce Rensberger
January 30, 1993
Somalia's two seed banks, facilities that stored samples of hundreds of varieties of food crops adapted to the country's soils and climates, were looted within the last three or four months and now stand empty, an international agricultural official said yesterday.
Because many starving farmers long ago ate seed they normally would save for their next planting, said Geoffrey C. Hawtin, director general of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources, efforts are underway to produce new seed from samples of Somali varieties stored in other countries.
Seeds of sorghum and corn, the country's two main crops, are being sought from seed banks as far away as the United States and Russia and in neighboring Kenya.
Because seed banks hold only a few ounces of seed of any given variety, the samples must be planted, harvested and replanted to build up quantities needed to supply Somali farmers. Hawtin estimated that it would take one to two years to meet the need.
In the meantime, he said, many Somali farmers must use seed of varieties optimally suited to growing in other places.
They may grow well or poorly in Somalia's soils or fall prey to pests to which local varieties were resistant.
Hawtin made his announcement here at a symposium on world food problems sponsored by the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Loss of seed does not affect all Somali farmers, Hawtin said. In some parts of the country, crops of sorghum and corn are in the field and, with the large supplies of imported food, it should be possible to save seed from domestic varieties now growing.
Fields in much of the country, however, lie fallow, unplanted because of lack of seed.
The few local varieties growing are not necessarily suited to other soils and climatic zones in Somalia. Farmers in those places, Hawtin said, must resort to imported "seed of unknown potential."
One Somali seed bank was operated by the Somalia Ministry of Agriculture at a research substation in Afgoi, and the other was a U.S.-funded facility in Baidoa in the middle of one of the worst-hit famine zones and one of the first towns "liberated" by U.S. Marines.
Hawtin said that it is not known exactly when the banks were looted but that it is thought to have happened within the last three or four months, after staffs abandoned the storage facilities.
Fortunately, he said, in 1989 a duplicate set of about 300 varieties of sorghum and corn were taken out of the country for safekeeping in the Kenya Genebank.
But because those samples amount to no more than about three ounces of seed for each variety, it will take time to produce large quantities of seed.
