On Oct. 19, 2015, the first withdrawl from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was required due to Syrian War. The seeds withdrawn included 31 boxes with wheat and barley samples that were returned to Morocco and 5 boxes with clover, medics, pea, forage legumes and grasses that were sent to Lebanon for multiplication.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The mission of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to insure against the loss of seeds in genebanks located throughout the world during large-scale regional or global crises. The seed vault is managed through a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.