Next to dates, olives have long been the second-most important perennial crop in Siwa. The Hamed olive from Siwa is world-renowned, and yet in recent years, European investors have introduced into Siwa many Kalamata trees from Greece and other cultivars from Spain. Because Egyptian labor costs far less than that in Southern Europe, these investors have attempted to undercut the prices for these same olives grown in Spain and Greece in the global marketplace. One set of investors from Canada, the U.S. and the European Union has proposed increasing the number of olive trees grown in Siwa from 70,000 to 4 million with the next decade, so that olive groves might eventually eclipse date plantations in economic importance. These investors would no doubt plant more of the European cultivars than the time-tried Hamed native heirloom, unless forced by political pressures to do otherwise. Nevertheless, as of this writing, the perennial cover of Siwa offered by dates, olives and jujube trees superficially looks much as it has looked for centuries.

What has already changed is the second tier of trees and shrubs grown at the oasis, and the vegetable varieties grown beneath these perennial fruits and nuts. Curiously, the number of species of fruits and nuts has increased at Siwa since the arrival of the paved road, because trucks can now carry in exotic nursery stock. Apples, guavas, prickly pear cactus and bananas have been added to the traditional Mediterranean mix of fruits and nuts such as figs, pomegranates, apricots, peaches, mulberries, citrus, hibiscus and grapes. Beneath these trees, shrubs and vines, a diverse array of vegetables, grains, legumes and spices are grown. European cucumbers have recently replaced the older snake melon cucumbers in dominance, and an heirloom called the honey melon has been replaced by modern cultivars of cantaloupe.

Nevertheless, some thirty-three crop species recorded at Siwa during the era of plant explorations by Forbes, Gudzoni and Vavilov remain in cultivation within the oasis, and many of the particular local varieties known as biladi ^[1] heirlooms remain in Siwan cuisine. I began to wonder what accounts for this relative stability in the crop repertoire found at Siwa, despite the many economic pressures being felt there to fully enter the globalized food economy.

1. See the discussion of “baladi” in the context of Jaffa oranges. [↩]

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The oasis of Siwa … leaves a strange impression, but perhaps one that is different and more paradoxical than that which Vavilov sensed in oases further west. There is at once a sense of uninterrupted continuity with the Berber oases of antiquity, with the mud walls of the Shali village compound rising high above thousands of palms, and a sense of rapid change, with tourist buses and European-style resorts evident all around the margins of that ancient compound. Since 1986, when the first paved bitumen road connected Siwa with the market economies of the rest of the world, the population of Siwa has more than doubled. Many of the new residents are neither Tasiwit-speaking “Berbers” nor Awlad Ali Badawi “Bedouins,” but are Arabs from Cairo or second-home Europeans who are economically engaged in making Siwa a great cultural and natural attraction.

While a million palms still cover the soggy, alkaline ground of the Siwan depression, there have been some notable changes in what is grown beneath their canopies in the shady understory. The meticulous field notes of Robert Forbes from 1919, C. Dalrymple Belgrave ^[1] from 1924, and Ahmed Fakhry from 1968 helped me evaluate the changes in agro-biodiversity which occurred in the years prior to my three visits to Siwa between 2004 and 2006.

Date palms may still be the most prominent food crop that Siwans rely upon for their own consumption and for export, but it appears that some changes in the varietal mix of date palms has occurred. Some historic reports claim that Siwan Berbers once grew dozens of folk varieties of dates, which their Awlad Ali Bedouin neighbors harvested and transported to Cairo and Alexandria. In 1832, travelers reported that as many as 9,000 camel loads of dates left Siwa for the Nile each season; a century and a half later, just before the paved road arrived in Siwa, the Bedouins had their camels carry 10,000 loads of dates across the desert to their traditional markets along the Nile. Today, just five date varieties dominate Siwa’s plantings, and the majority of the harvesting is done by migrant workers from the Upper Nile. Much of their harvest is transported by lorries or flat-bed trucks, and only two Siwan dates are regularly featured in the markets located elsewhere in Egypt and overseas: the flavorful world-class sai’idi date, and the medicinal tagtaggt. Most of Siwa’s other dates are much like the varieties grown in other oases, so they are less competitive in a globalized markets. Fortunately, Slow Food International is assisting Siwans with the recovery of the rare varieties still found around the oasis, and is helping market the entire range of Siwan date diversity in specialty shops.

1. An extremely interesting character, whose account of Siwa may be the least of his achievements. [↩]

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Unlike Vavilov — who had to content himself with sending the Italian student Gudzoni — Gary Nabhan was able to visit Egypt himself. Drawing on previous expeditions by the plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes, Nabhan found that much was the same, and much had changed. This is the first of his posts on Siwa. ^[1]

Robert Humphrey Forbes, from the Arizona Memory Project

Eighty years later, my own attempts to visit the palm oases of the Sahara landed me near the Egypt-Libya border in the heat of August, but no further west than that. And yet, the Berber and Bedouin oasis which I studied most intensively was much like those which Vavilov visited in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, and of the very same ilk of those which his coworker Gudzoni sampled in Egypt. Most fortuitously, a contemporary of Vavilov — plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes ^[2] — left detailed photographic and written records of his visit to the same oasis, Siwa, from an extended stay in 1919. Although Vavilov and Forbes apparently crossed paths only once — in 1930 at a lecture in Tucson, Arizona — their methodologies and goals were much the same: to seek out seeds and identify the adaptations of a diversity of crop varieties for evaluation and introduction into analogous environments. Thus, the benchmark data collected at the Siwa oasis by Forbes will serve as a surrogate for what Vavilov himself might have collected there if he had been allowed into the interior of Egypt.

During the era when Vavilov and Forbes wandered into the Sahara, it took several days by car and camel to reach Wahat Siwa, the Pearl of the Desert, from the port town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt. Wahat Siwa — the Siwan Depression sits — below sea level on the northern edge of the Great Sand Sea, some 315 kilometers south of the Mediterranean shores, and less than 100 kilometers from the present-day Libyan border. After hours of crossing the barren “gibbel” plains where only a few Awlad Ali Bedouins and their camels wander amidst the cobbles and gravel, the wondrous sight of a million date palms and dozens of lakes appears as if it were an improbable mirage. Suddenly, deep greens and blues replace the bleached-out tans and grays of the stony desert. The sharp aroma of oily, bitter desert herbs is replaced with the sweeter fragrance of orange blossoms, dates, mints, and hibiscus.

It is not a mirage; there are some thousand artesian springs feeding into Siwa’s lakes and ponds, with two hundred of those springs directly irrigating some 3800 hectares of date palms, fruit trees, gardens and grain fields. The twenty thousand inhabitants of Siwa represent the largest human settlement for five hundred kilometers in any direction other than that of Marsa Matruh.

1. A more scientific account can be found in Agrobiodiversity change in a saharan desert oasis, 1919–2006: Historic shifts in tasiwit (Berber) and Bedouin crop inventories of Siwa, Egypt. [↩]
2. Working in Egypt for the British, he later went on to serve in Arizona, where he lived to be 100 years old. [↩]

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Gary Nabhan was in Russia last week to receive the Vavilov Memorial Medal at the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow. He is only the second foreign scientist to receive this honour. In addition to delivering a lecture on Origins, Dispersal and Conservation of Domesticated Plants and Animals in Moscow and, later, St Petersburg, Gary found time to share his reflections after years of retracing Vavilov through the centres of food diversity, while writing the book Where Our Food Comes From, and after spending time with the staff of the Vavilov General Genetics Institute in Moscow and of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) in St Petersburg.

Gary Nabhan in Russia to receive the Vavilov Memorial Medal

I sit overlooking Saint Isaac’s Square, a few hundred meters from where Nikolay Vavilov managed the first and perhaps the most massive effort in human history to document and conserve the world’s food biodiversity. I have had the rare opportunity of seeing the seedbank in the basement of Vavilov’s institute, and of leafing through the herbarium sheets, where one can see the master’s hand on collections of plants from the deserts, the steppes and the rainforests. And I have seen the photos there of those who perished while protecting the seeds for the benefit of all of humankind

I have also spoken with his surviving descendants: his only living son, Yuri, and with VIR’s director, Nikolay Dzyubenko, who continues to manage the tremendous scientific effort begun many decades ago. They remain committed to Nikolay Vavilov’s vision, but why? Political and economic support for such conservation has waxed and waned over the years, and there are always new challenges and frustrations.

Oddly, it seems that a certain emotional, philosophical and perhaps spiritual commitment to this work has seldom waned among its participants. One quickly realizes that these people are not necessarily in it for the money, the social approval of professional peers, nor the fame, if any!

Instead, they find something inherently and immensely satisfying about saving the remaining living riches of the world’s agricultural landscapes and cultures: the seeds, fruits and roots which feed us. They are working for a higher purposes, for the good of humanity, and if the work is done properly, the good of the earth itself.

If any scientist wished to be inspired to a higher cause, perhaps no one was more equipped to do so than Nikolay Vavilov. He was breathtakingly handsome and elegant yet field-worthy; he was visionary, yet articulate and a lover of detail; he was charismatic, tireless and intense, yet approachable. He would listen to farmer, muleskinner, camel drover and evolutionary biologist, and absorb their stories.

And yet, what ultimately inspires us today to continue with such efforts is not Vavilov’s ghost from the past, but the promise of a more equitable and nourishing food community for the future. We hope that our children and their children beyond them will eat well without damaging the very soil and soul of the earth itself.

And we know that in the recent past, some forms of agriculture have done such damage. Since Vavilov’s time, we have lost three-quarters of the former genetic base of our crops and livestock, squandering the diversity of flavours and fragrances by assuming that fossil fuel and fossil groundwater could be consumed without end to produce more food. Today, agriculture is responsible for generating half of the human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases to grow our food and fibre. We can do better. We can wean ourselves from our addictions to fossil fuel and groundwater, but only if we renew our commitment to wisely steward the natural resources and the cultural wisdom that has accumulated in our agricultural landscapes over the last ten millennia.

With rapid global climate change upon us, we need a greater diversity of seeds, breeds, fruits and roots out in our fields, adapting to the dynamic conditions there, more than ever before. Food diversity is no longer a luxury; its careful use and stewardship are once again a necessity if we are to feed future generations so that they can not survive but thrive. Vavilov pointed the way; we must not dwell so much on him as a signpost, but move to where he was pointing.

Congratulations to Gary, and our thanks for this missive.

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