Middle East Eye: From El-Obeid to the Arctic – The Secret Mission That Saved Over 2,000 Seeds from Sudan
7 August 2025
In December 2023, the civil war that had broken out the previous April between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took a troubling turn when the paramilitary group seized the country’s second-largest city, Wad Madani, in a swift offensive.
The sudden fall of Wad Madani, under circumstances that are not yet fully clear, dealt a heavy blow to the regular army and came as a shock to the hundreds of thousands of people, many of them displaced from Khartoum, who had come to see the city as a safe refuge.
The RSF’s advance quickly triggered a new mass displacement of people and disrupted the work of humanitarian agencies that had relocated to the city after the war broke out.
Like in other areas they have passed through, RSF fighters extensively looted Wad Madani and widespread abuses against the population were documented.
Although it drew little attention at the time, Sudanese scientists also issued a call to protect one specific facility in Wad Madani: the city’s seedbank, the most important in all of Sudan.
Read more to see if the staff of Sudan's genebank were able to save their collection of more than 17,000 seed samples of crops and wild plant species, including sorghum, millet, wheat and sesame.
Category: For The Press
