"Syrian War Spurs First Withdrawal From Doomsday Arctic Seed Vault"

"Syria's civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a 'doomsday' vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday.

The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

'Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,' said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole."

Alister Doyle reports for Reuters September 21, 2015.