Ark of the dry lands

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0:30We do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Each episode covers the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings and why starting over can feel so hard. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Imagine buying a toy for your kid, but it doesn't come with batteries. That sucks. But honestly, it's even worse when you buy business software. You end up with fragmented, disconnected systems that cost a fortune and don't talk to each other.

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1:50This is where we prepare the couscous. This is the first stage. We start by rolling the grains of the couscous in a traditional way. Then we put it in the dryer. We are using the whole wheat. We are adding water, some water with salt. Then I add a little bit of the flour. Then I start rolling with the palms of my hand. So we can separate the big grains from the small ones.

2:45Laziza Atmani is making couscous by hand with her friends. Ten women who've come together to create the Al Amal Farming Cooperative near Azrou in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

3:01Now we will use another sieve.

3:08All by hand, all the sieves. We add flour.

3:17Now this is the process. It is ready. We will take it to the steamer. We're here with Dr Nada Usulus. She's kindly translating from Daria Arabic. Nada has known the cooperative for years. They are cultivating this land totally using the local grains. Just amazing. Nada explained that women who once stayed at home are becoming farmers because so many men have left the land in search of work, especially in the last six years of drought, the longest in Morocco since records began. Women find a way to be more independent. They can take decisions. Some women got credit from banks. Even if it's risky, things start to change.

4:10At the beginning, we were neighbors. Not only neighbors and friends and sisters, we had a good relationship. And from 2006, we are working together like sisters. And once one member of us is absent, we feel it. As women, we can work, we have skills, and even carrying heavy sacks, we can do it without men. It's a new life. Farming has always been precarious, but nowadays there's no predicting from one season to the next, especially in very dry places like this. We've come to Morocco to meet the farmers and scientists who are using ancient, wild forms of seeds to help make farming more secure. There's a global hub of research for the dry lands here.

5:12It's called the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, ICADA for short. Nada Usalus works here, a social geographer supporting farmers like Al-Amal. Ikada gives seeds for free to anyone who asks. Barley, wheat, beans, vegetables. And some of them are very special. Just entering Ikada here in Rabat. It's got a big glass front. Family of cats shelter in from the sun by the stairs as you enter. Display cabinet on the wall here with lots of different types of wheat and barley and cereals all pinned like samples in the frame. and lots and lots of plants everywhere, outside all these palm trees and blossoms and inside all these plants.

6:00You never really quite know what's a garden plant and what's a piece of research. There's people around in lab coats, but also in overalls and carrying trays of samples and clipboards, and you can hear the machines whirring from inside the laboratories. This is a dream place. My name is Filippo Bassi. I'm Italian. Filippo is principal scientist at ICADA. He specialises in breeding durum wheat. My main job is to make sure that farmers in the global south get new and better variety of durum wheat, which is the crop that makes your pasta and your couscous or burghul, depends what you eat, and a lot of your biscuits, by the way.

6:43I don't even know how many countries are represented here. Of course, here in Morocco, there's a lot of Moroccans, and we have quite a few from Ethiopia, India, but people come from all over the world. and that's the beauty of it. So what counts as a dry land? North Africa for sure, good part of East Africa, then you have the West African savannas, there's also South Asia, there's a lot of parts of it that are actually dry, South of Europe has dry lands, you know, all Central Asia has a lot of dry lands as well. So they're very extended, they represent more than a third of the global surface, probably today almost half of the global surface.

7:18Dry lands are very special because they are meant to feed the world. And they're doing so with less and less water, more and more high temperatures. These days with climate change, people start asking what is not a dry area.

7:33Laaziza Atmani:Look at this. Good. You see this plant here? This one is growing nicely. It's green. This one is dark green. It's dying. Dr Ahmed Amri is a pioneer of seed conservation and head of genetic resources for many years. Everyone at Ikada knows him. Ahmed began life on his parents' farm north of the Sahara near Tisnit. Wow, okay. I grew up in a very large family with six sisters and six other brothers, 13 of us, plus a lot of other people living with us in the house. In total, it's 23 people living in the same house. We had a small farm, barley, wheat, some vegetables, mint. I do everything related to harvesting, you know, going and cutting the forages for cows.

8:28Laaziza Atmani:I watch the sheep and goats. Most of the work in agriculture, I have done it. I am among the few people that still remember a lot of old songs of my hometown.

8:52Ahmed studied plant breeding and went on to travel the world. The centre of his research was the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture first began in the modern Middle East. The wild plants that grow there, that scientists call land races, are the ancestors of the cereals and crops that we eat all over the world today.

9:14Laaziza Atmani:The fertile crescent, it's like this arc that goes southern Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, southern Turkey, Syria, west Iran and Iraq. When you do a map of distribution of species of global importance like wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea, faba bean, dryland fruit trees, like almonds, like olive, like, you know, pistachia. For these species, it coincides exactly. This is why we call it Fertile Crescent. Wherever you go, you can find some historical sites that tell you a big story. The Fertile Crescent is not a mythical term. It's a real place, yeah? when you go in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon or some area of Jordan or other countries you do feel you are in the cradle of humanity.

10:13And then you see the side of the mountains are completely wild and that's where you see all these wild relatives of our crop species. Now imagine you lift a stone somewhere in a very deserted high plateau in Iraq and underneath you find this little plant that is growing in places that haven't seen rain for months. So we pick some of these very unique weeds. We combine with some of our most performing varieties into a new variety that is now more adapted to the climate. So we plant thousands and thousands and thousands of them. I make the joke many times that we are the people that fail the most on the planet.

10:55I make thousands and thousands and thousands of them, and maybe one of them is good. So I made 9 ,999 bad ones, but the good one is my ability of finding it is what really pays off. This needle in the haystack. And we are pretty happy to say that it worked. And so we have gone wild. All the seeds that ICADA works with, and many more, are kept in the seed vault, or gene bank, on site. We could call it the heart of ICADA. or maybe it's the brain. The gene bank is amazing. The responsibility is in perpetuity. It means you come back 3 ,000 years from now, every single one of the seed samples that are in the gene bank will still be there, ready for you to use.

11:43Perpetuity. I don't know what else in humans is in perpetuity, but they are committed forever.

11:54I'm Zacharia Kajas. So we've stepped inside a large sealed metal door and instantly it feels cold in here. A gene bank is a fridge, right? And of course, before storing them in the cold room, you need to dry them. If you come with me here, it's where we put seed to reduce the humidity so we can be able then to put them in the cold rooms. Zakaria leads research into genetic resources and gene banking. He took us through dimly lit chambers. There were rows and rows and rows of metal shelves stacked with plastic jars of seeds, each with its own label. I will show you. This is seed of wheat. You see that?

12:40We are sending to Europe, United States, you know, Africa. I want anybody on the planet to find what they need, if they need. So neatly packed with the numbers and the labels written on. Everything is digitalised because this is important. When you are handling around 90 ,000 unique samples, you need to leave no room for mistakes. 90 ,000 samples or accessions. It's full of surprises. A lot of what we have, you will absolutely never see it in a market. Did you eat before any chickpea like that? No, never. OK, exactly. They were pink, pink chickpeas, and then Zakaria showed us black chickpeas. I would like to put this with some curry sauce, etc., and taste it.

13:26It will be wonderful, I'm sure. What's the oldest seeds that you've got stored in this room? I think the oldest one we have at Icardha, it's a barley that was collected in Norway. It's 1884, something like that. 1884, when Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was revolutionary. Those were the early days of modern thinking about genetics, though no one used the word gene yet. Some keen botanist must have picked this barley head long ago in Norway and filed it away carefully, maybe planting and re-harvesting to preserve its special characteristics. Thinking about these 150-year-old accessions, they're not static.

14:15Gene banking doesn't freeze time. It's a living process. and like all living things, it's vulnerable. Every single sample needs to have a copy in one reliable seed bank that we call first level of safety duplication and the second one is in Svalbard in Norway. Svalbard, that's the global seed vault where the world's seeds are backed up in storerooms deep under the permafrost in the Arctic Circle. Copies of the copies. Absolutely every respectable gene bank needs to have that because you need to have this heritage, safety duplicated in case of fire, earthquake, war. You invest in uninsurance. Sometimes some people say, why am I paying£1 ,000 a year?

15:04I never have accident. Yeah, but you will in case you do. You have something. What we say, we say predictions are complicated, especially about the future, right?

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15:50You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. The Okada collection was originally kept in Aleppo in Syria, but in 2012, civil war broke out. Ahmed Amri was there.

16:04Laaziza Atmani:You know what has happened? Unfortunately, the situation really deteriorated. we had to leave Aleppo. I was among the last people to leave. It was a sad situation. But prior to that, my predecessors were sending a duplicate sample to other GMAC. By 2014, almost 83 % of what we had in Aleppo were safe duplicated in Suvalbard. Then we decided that, well, we have to regenerate all the collection that is in Syria. Every year we brought like 30 ,000, 35 ,000, 38 ,000. And we were able, within five years, to regenerate all of the accessions, which is a huge work. Today we have almost 152 ,000 accessions that are back into our gene map.

17:02We see so many headlines about urban destruction in times of war. Houses, roads, cities. But there are dreadful long-term costs to farms and farmers. A country that is in civil unrest is not always easy to get out of the house and risk lives to do farming. Filippo Bassi. The case of Syria is a good example. The country was a global exporter to the neighbouring countries of wheat, thanks to the work Icardo did for a long time.

17:31Laaziza Atmani:Oh, that is very touching because Syria was exporting vegetables, exporting fruits, exporting everything. After the war, nothing. Everything collapsed. I have a lot of friends, farmers in Syria that have gone to Turkey. They have left all their lands. So what do you think? Obviously, the seed stock of a lot of the farmers there is gone, is depleted. I mean, they couldn't always harvest. They had droughts, very severe droughts on top of it. Now we are there side by side trying to re-help them with new variety, better seeds and everything, so they replant. So now we are trying to really see how can we help making sure that whatever is replanted is the best for the future and not just like what they had in the past.

18:23I suppose people have always told stories of survival in crisis. You probably know the story of Noah's Ark, when a great flood was coming and Noah sheltered pairs of animals on a huge boat and in some accounts gathered food so that would be saved too. That story came out of the Fertile Crescent and it's about humans looking after nature, protecting biodiversity. Once the scientists have collected the land races, they may cross them with modern crops, scattering the pollen by hand. They plant the seeds in special growing fields. Now the true test begins.

19:02About an hour outside of Rabat, as far as the eye can see, there are these golden waves of wheat and barley. And the air is shimmering above the crops in the heat. And there's butterflies, birds, swallows darting. There's wildflowers in the margins between the rows of crops. Crops that have been tested by Okada here. looking for these traits, whether it's disease resistance or drought tolerance. This is a living laboratory.

19:37There's cracks in the ground while we're walking between the crops. So dry. The cracks are open and you can see beetles crawling out of them. You can feel this aridity and this drought and this dryness that people talk about. I like the sounds of the birds the wind going through the crops it's amazing I'm Hafsa Qabaj, I am Moroccan I am a research associate working with Icardia I'm a genomic breeder In front of us we have hectares of single plants coming from different crosses. So each line is unique. When Hafsa says line, she means each different kind of seed that she's testing and trying, even if these differences might just be very subtle.

20:39so they were selected to be resistant for different diseases to be highly productive to have a good food quality what's this label down here have so so we put this labels with the barcode that if you scan it you can get to all the information about this specific line its origin the pedigree what was the parents in the cross for example this white barley with the black hats it is from pakistan and was collected exactly on june 17 1986 in balily 13 kilometers north from kweta of an altitude of one four thousand meter collected by gene bank team so this is just one example but there's thousands and thousands of barcodes that can be scanned.

21:37Yes. The next patch of wheat spikes looked different. All kinds of shapes and sizes and colours, and they weren't all labelled yet. This is amazing. You can see all the diversity here, and this is the beauty of the land races. Thanks to the new technologies of sequencing, we can look for the genes that's maybe completely hidden. This was collected between the 1920s and the 1930s from around the world. Hafsa said this was the Watkins collection, arrived just a few weeks ago. It's named after Arthur E. Watkins from England. He gathered over a thousand wheatland races from 32 countries a century ago.

22:27Watkins was worried that they were already disappearing. And indeed today, many have. He thought they might be useful one day in the future, a future that we're now living in. Running your hand through the cereal heads feels like a connection with both the past and the present. In this corner of the field, Hafsa and I were travelling through time. Amazingly, we have learned races that were originally collected from here, Morocco, and coming back for the first time again to Morocco for field testing. The seeds were repatriated. They came back home. And they seem to be doing really well. Yeah, they are doing great.

23:14Is it exciting as a scientist? Yeah, it is exciting.

23:21You can see that a lot of what we are doing in the island, it's coming slowly, slowly to Europe because the climate is changing. And you can see that maybe the environment that we were breeding for in Syria or Egypt or in Morocco 10 years ago, that's maybe the target environment now in France or in northern Spain or even in the UK. So there is still a lot to do, and we need to do it fast. And that's why modern technologies are important. And for somebody like us, holding this diversity, we need to be quick in responding to those challenges.

24:02How long can one person spend inside these fridges? If you see my colleagues that they spend a lot of time, they are very well equipped with coats going and then minus 40. They have helmets, et cetera. I want to show you this. It's long-term storage. This one. This is very cold. You have even ice. You can hear that, you see? So this is where we put long-term storage. Yeah, it's getting cold, you see. It will not go. The long-term storage room is the gene bank's coldest cell of all. There are parcels and crates, all taped up, shipping labels still on them. These represent global collaboration, how seed banks are backing each other up all around the world.

24:55Those ones, for example, you see that coming from India. This is from India. So here we have two big rooms, and we will see there that we have here in Morocco safe copies from another center in Nigeria. We have safety copy from Armenia here as well. And in Lebanon we have other copies from Syria, Iraq, Yemen. So we'll keep the same quality for almost 100 years.