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COULD ANCIENT WHEAT
With modern wheat in short
supply and lacking genetic
diversity and resilience, Israeli
seed detectives are amassing a
treasure of ancient cultivars.

ELANA SHAP | ISRAEL21C
16 FEBRUARY 2, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
A quarter of the world’s food comes from just one crop. It grows
abundantly in Russia and Ukraine, but war has obstructed the
supply chain.

Add to this the eff ects of climate change, and a major food crisis
seems inevitable.

One solution could be lying in a seed collection housed in the
Israel Plant Gene Bank of the Volcani Center Agricultural Research
Organization near Tel Aviv.

“We have built up a collection of over 900 wheat lines. This is a
massive and rich collection compared to banks in other parts of the
world,” Volcani researcher Sivan Frenkin said. “It’s really a toolbox
for the cultivation and improvement of future wheat varieties, to
cope with climate change or crop diseases like wheat rust.”
Since the 1950s, wheat has been plentiful due to the cultivation
of modern varieties that produce high yields. Today, it is one of
three staple foods (aside from rice and maize) and accounts for the
nutrition and income of more than 4 billion people worldwide.

So where does the problem lie?
Despite its success in feeding the world, modern wheat lacks
genetic diversity and is not resilient enough to withstand droughts,
fl oods and pests. And this is where ancient wheat lines (landraces)
from Israel have a distinct advantage.

A genetic treasure
“The Near East climate ranges from arid to Mediterranean, under
which local wheat landraces have been grown for millennia,
assumingly accumulating a unique repertoire of genetic adaptations,”
states Frenkin, a Ph.D. candidate researching restoration of lost
genetic diversity of wheat landraces from Israel.

Roi Ben David, director of agricultural research at the Volcani
Center, concurred: “Israel is geographically sitting on a genetic
treasure. These are wheat lines that go back to the beginning of
agriculture where cultivation of wheat started.”
New wheat varieties could also counter the eff ects of the current
disruption to the supply chain. The war in Ukraine, he estimated,
has caused the loss of wheat equivalent to that consumed by 151
million people in an average year. Floods in India have also become
a regular occurrence and in the past few seasons have seen large
areas of wheat crops destroyed.

Wheat: Stepanyda; Background: Larysa Pashkevich//iStock/Getty Images
Be the Solution
to the World’s
Food Crisis?