Saving Iraq’s Seeds, One Garden at a Time
- Lala Thaddeus, Prism
- 1 minute ago
- 9 min read
This is the second article in a three-part series called “Reseeding the Land.” This series explores land revitalization, cultural stewardship, and food access in a time of significant decline of ecological health and climate upheaval across the U.S. Read Part 1 here.
On a late March day in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, the Dudley Greenhouse is buzzing with activity.
The cavernous space smells of fertile soil and shelters tender, young seedlings from the chilly spring air. Situated between rows of tables holding sprouts in seed-starting trays, community gardeners and urban farmers gather in the space for a free annual seed exchange, hosted by The Food Project, Boston Community Gardens, CitySprouts, and the Dorchester Food Co-op.
A large table boasting hundreds of packets of vegetable and flower seeds is the center of the activity. But one person, an event organizer, flits among the crowd, clutching a black cardboard box, discreetly showing its contents to a few curious attendees. Inside are heirloom seeds of vegetables native to Iraq, a country whose agricultural sector was crippled by the U.S. occupation that began in 2003.
The seeds are a product of the work of the Iraqi Seed Collective, a U.S.-based group of seed growers that aims to make Iraqi heirloom vegetable seeds available to the Iraqi diaspora in the U.S. Eventually, the collective plans to repatriate these seeds back to Iraq, where they’ve all but gone extinct. Comprising a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, the collective fosters a space for voices of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian seed stewards from the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region and beyond to preserve the “genetic legacy” of Iraqi crops.
“Iraq is the original melting pot,” said Nibal Rabiyah, a founding member of the Iraqi Seed Collective. Some members are professional vegetable growers, others are poets. But all members are bound by a desire to preserve a nation’s biodiversity and culinary culture.
The majority of the Iraqi seeds the collective works with are through the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). This network of seed banks across the U.S. aims to preserve and research global plants’ genetic diversity. By requesting seeds from the USDA’s various seed banks, the collective aims to return the seeds of these culturally significant vegetables to Iraqis.
The collective’s practice of seed saving aims to re-establish the diversity of native crops that thrived in Iraq before the U.S. military’s deposition of Iraq’s former leader, Saddam Hussein. Seed saving is the practice of collecting and storing a plant’s seeds from one harvest to the next. While some crops can be grown for both consumption and seed, seed saving often entails allowing a plant to “go to seed” so that the seeds are mature enough to be harvested. Before the U.S. globalization of patented seed technology after World War II, this is how agriculture functioned throughout human history.
Extinction by replacement
Earlier in March, the Iraqi Seed Collective co-hosted a meeting with the Broudou School, a Tunisia-based collective that engages with ecology and research. Members explained why those Iraqi seeds later shared at the Dudley Greenhouse were so precious.
After the U.S. occupation of Iraq began in 2003, the U.S. military bombed Iraq’s national seed bank in Abu Ghraib, effectively eliminating hundreds of varieties of indigenous seeds adapted to growing in the drought-prone desert climate. The U.S. appointed Paul Bremer as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversaw the restructuring of Iraq’s government following Saddam’s trial. Bremer issued 100 orders that would fundamentally change Iraq’s constitution and ability to self-govern.
In 2004, U.S. colonial law prohibited Iraqi farmers from seed saving. The law, known as Order 81, effectively stripped farmers of their autonomy to pick the strongest seeds from their harvest, cross-pollinate them, and trade with other farmers to grow better or more suitable plants the following season.
Following Bremer’s declaration that Iraq was “open for business,” Western agribusiness giants like Monsanto, Cargill, and Dow Chemicals saw Iraq’s agricultural sector, already weakened by droughts and Western sanctions in the 1990s, as a promising business opportunity. With Order 81 in place, Iraqi farmers had no choice but to buy into Western agribusinesses and their patented seed technology.
Unlike open-pollinated seeds, which are naturally pollinated through wind and insects, patented seeds must be repurchased or relicensed from their manufacturer every single year. Some are bred to yield a diminishing crop season after season, guaranteeing that a farmer repurchases them from the manufacturer. Farmers failing to relicense patented seeds can be sued by the manufacturing company. The patented seeds need specific inputs like fertilizer and pesticides that must also be purchased from the same manufacturer.
This business model effectively trapped Iraqi farmers into a never-ending financial commitment to foreign companies and removed their autonomy to select, breed, and farm the varieties of produce they were used to eating. The seeds that were introduced to Iraq were foreign, mainly of American, Chinese, and German origin, and gradually replaced the country’s existing traditional crops. Rather than helping farmers continue to grow a diversity of wheat used to make bread for the purpose of export, foreign aid introduced pasta wheat, for example, which is not part of the Iraqi diet.
Connection across borders
Rabiyah tells of a friend who, after a decade away, visited Iraq and couldn’t find any of the vegetables at the local markets he used to eat. Certain varieties of produce — like al kuffa tomato, which has a low water content suitable for making tabbouleh — simply weren’t there.
However, these tomatoes, along with aswad eggplant, Ali Baba watermelon, and batikh honeydew melon, were brought to the U.S. in the 1990s and were commercially available within American seed catalogs. These four crops were the first seeds that the Iraqi Seed Collective experimented with.
The Iraqi Seed Collective was formed in 2020, with Rabiyah in Boston and Ali Ruxin in Brooklyn, both urban growers of Iraqi ancestry. Their work was inspired by the Palestine Seed Library and Vivien Sansour’s efforts to preserve threatened Palestinian heirloom vegetables. Through a listserv and Instagram, the group quickly began connecting with people across the U.S. who were in possession of Iraqi seeds to expand their library, which currently boasts over 30 varieties of heirloom vegetable seeds.
My dream is that there will be Iraqi crops coming to farmers’ markets. — Nibal Rabiyah, Iraqi Seed Collective founding member
For now, the collective’s main goal is to expand its stock of available seeds. Eventually, Rabiyah wants to introduce Iraqi produce into the American diet.
“My dream is that there will be Iraqi crops coming to farmers’ markets,” Rabiyah said. “We’re saving the seeds, but once the crops are more stable, how do they become commonplace?”
Within Boston, which, according to Rabiyah, does not have a sizable Iraqi population, the collective’s work has taken a foothold with other people from the SWANA region.
In Boston, Rabiyah has sold produce outside a mosque along with a Sudanese man who grows Nubian crops. Their stall featured typical American vegetables, as well as molokhia, a spinach-like green; purslane, a weedy plant with succulent leaves; and a Nubian cucumber-like vegetable similar to the Iraqi ta’roozi.
“We’d have these crops, and people would be really emotional seeing them,” Rabiyah said. “It was really impactful to see how much it can mean to someone to see something fresh from [their homeland].”
The seeds and their connection to culinary and ecological traditions have proven to be powerful tools for bringing people together across borders. Despite the decades of violent history between Iraq and Iran, Iranian American seed farmer Leila Rezvani found themselves drawn to the collective’s work. Rezvani told Prism, “We talk a lot in the collective about how governments and geopolitical power struggles are not reflective of the needs … of the actual people in these countries.”
Seed bank to seed library
The growers within the Iraqi Seed Collective continue to experiment with raising new seed varieties. But the seeds are not coming from Iraq, largely because they can no longer be found in the country. Instead, they’re coming out of the USDA’s GRIN, which fulfills seed requests made by researchers and professional plant breeders. Part of the collective’s work is to reclaim the seeds from the USDA and return them to the people of that culture.
Children of immigrants born in the U.S., like Rezvani, can face difficulty visiting their homeland for fear of persecution due to their gender expression or geopolitical instability. Rezvani told Prism that they’re “able to connect with some piece of [Iran] through growing these crops and sharing them with other people in our communities.”
Rezvani has requested several varieties of Iranian seeds from the USDA seed banks, which they find “pretty astonishing,” with seeds dating back to a century. For Rezvani, this “botanical exploration” conducted by the U.S. brings up the question of whether the seeds were acquired through a consensual exchange with Indigenous farmers or collected through a wider practice of colonialism.
“The way they’re named is very strange,” Rabiyah said. “It feels colonial.” Seeds within the GRIN seed banks are listed by their taxonomic label, their origins simplified to “Collected – Iraq,” erasing the identity of the seed’s original stewards.
There is a political dimension to freeing the seeds and making them available to the people native to the same land as the crops. “A lot of people would call it theft or biopiracy,” Rezvani said, “this idea of just taking a seed from where it’s from and putting it in this bank, and then evaluating it for certain characteristics.” Seed banks exist to conserve and research biodiversity, meaning that these seeds can become patented and then sold back at a profit in another country. This leaves out the people who originally bred them over centuries, which is the issue plaguing Iraqi crops.
Nate Kleinman, who has successfully requested seeds from the USDA seed bank for the last 15 years for his nonprofit, the Experimental Farm Network, which works to mitigate climate change through a more collectivist agricultural system, helps the Iraqi Seed Collective get access to GRIN seeds.
“So many of those traditional seed varieties are no longer grown in the communities where they come from, let alone in diaspora communities,” Kleinman said. He feels an “obligation” to get native seeds back into the hands of the people who’ve historically grown and consumed them.
But the Trump administration has made getting the seeds into the hands of cultural stewards difficult. Recent cuts to the USDA budget have caused anxiety for Iraqi Seed Collective members, who fear losing access to the seeds available through GRIN. Kleinman, who has experienced the repercussions of budget cuts made by previous administrations, is worried about how the seed banks will continue to function under Donald Trump. So far this year, the Trump administration has fired 1,255, or nearly 18%, of the Agricultural Research Service, which houses GRIN. The administration has also slashed the ARS budget by $159 million.
“Now, funding toward programs geared toward research, plant breeding work, and sustainable farming have all been frozen or canceled,” Kleinman said. It’s these volatilities that drive the Iraqi Seed Collective’s work. Ruxin, one of the group’s founding members, told Prism, “A seed company can decide not to grow something out from year to year.” Rather than relying on the whims of seed companies or presidential administrations, Ruxin said the collective intends to have permanent, predictable access to heirloom Iraqi seeds and be able to “exchange them freely” within their own communities.
The personal side of seeds
For Noor Al-Samarrai, an Iraqi American poet, it’s important that the collective’s work continues to center the seeds rather than “growth and productivity.” “We’re not trying to go lobby for some congressional decision,” she said. “We’re just doing what needs to be done, which is planting seeds and growing them out.”
The group’s work quickly spread outside the Northeast to growers across the U.S., which has allowed them to experiment with growing a wider variety of Iraqi produce. From her backyard, Rivka Ben Daniel, an Iraqi Jew living in Los Angeles, grows a variety of vegetables, such as wheat, for the collective.
Born in Iraq, Bendaniel’s Mizrahi family faced expulsion in 1950 along with tens of thousands of other Iraqi Jews. Her family resettled in Israel, where she said she became “disconnected” from her “culture, language, heritage, and tradition.” Joining the collective has enabled her to reconnect with her Iraqi identity.
“I feel like I’m doing something meaningful to me,” Ben Daniel said. “I can connect with my roots in a meaningful way, which I was not able to do for most of my life.”
Al-Samarrai, who is the only member of her family not born in Iraq, grew up in California and heard her parents compare the landscapes of California and Iraq. Her immigrant parents “were cobbling [together] ways to eat traditionally,” she said. Every once in a while, her mom “would eat a peach or a tomato and get a look of pleasure on her face, like, ‘Oh this tastes like the fruit back home.’”
For Rabiyah, what Al-Samarrai’s mother experienced is the heart of the collective’s work. “Unlocking a memory is the goal,” Rabiyah said.
Al-Samarrai, recounting an experience of harvesting seeds with a friend who runs an herb farm, was surprised to find how simple it is to harvest seeds.
“We literally blew our breath onto the seeds to separate the seed from the shaft,” Al-Samarrai said. “I remember thinking, ‘This is literally our ancestors’ breath in these seeds.’ It’s literally people’s breath being passed along.”
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. They report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
