Visit to ICARDA

The past couple of days we have toured ICARDA and spoken with their staff. The area served by ICARDA includes 1 billion people with 700 million of them living in poverty. ICARDA is working to make agriculture in these countries more productive and sustainable for the people and the environment. Their work takes special consideration of women and children as they are the first segment of the population to be affected when resources are limited. Women also do most of the farm work. ICARDA has a world class seed bank and much of the work we saw focused on wheat, fava beans, chickpeas and other important food sources.

We visited field plots where Dr. Mustafa El Bohissini and his students are growing medicinal plants to learn which are most attractive to beneficial insects (those that attack insect pests). Doug Landis’ work in Michigan has involved planting native plants along fields to attract beneficial insects. In Michigan, the fields are large and it is less difficult to convince a farmer to plant a non-crop plant along a field edge or in less productive areas. Here, farming is more common in small plots, so they hope to convince farmers to plant medicinal plants that can both increase biodiversity and also be harvested for profit.



Mustafa and a graduate student with Doug Landis examine medicinal plants being tested for their ability to to attract beneficial insects.



Mustafa and some of his staff in the entomology section of ICARDA.



On our return to the city, we stopped at Aleppo's citadel, the world's largest. Aleppo, Damascus and Jericho seem to be equally considered the oldest contiguous city in the world. The citadel was built in 1210 and the city was started sometime between 5,000 and 11,000 BC.



View of the city from the citadel. Apartment roofs are covered with satellite dishes.