Genes From Wild Plants In Region Vital For Crops Millions of people could in future face starvation as an indirect result of the violent turmoil in the Middle East, which has the highest concentration of wild crop plants needed to produce new food varieties, scientists said. Civil wars raging in Syria and Iraq threaten future food resources because of the crucial role the region plays as the home of the wild plants continually needed to improve genetic quality of domesticated crops. The region, part of the Fertile Crescent, an ancient area of fertile soil and vital rivers stretching in an arc from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates and encompassing Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon, has the greatest diversity of “wild crop relatives” in the world. Yet many of these plants are endangered as a result of the civil strife, said Nigel Maxted of the University of Birmingham’s School of Biosciences. “The Middle East is where the basis of our future food security is located... Wheat is not a native UK species. It was brought from the Fertile Crescent centuries ago,” Maxted said. “If we’re trying to get food security in Europe, the issue is not conserving species that are currently found in Europe, but conserving species that are found in the Fertile Crescent, which is where the crops that we consume every day generally come from.“ Experts from Birmingham University are involved in a new initiat tive by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to help I conserve the wild relatives of crops in countries where they are found, especially in conflict zones. “You can have a range of seeds, but the best thing is to conserve them where they are found,“ Maxted said. The two sites with the richest concentrations of wild crop relatives anywhere in the world lie within Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The inventory indicates that, globally , about 21% of wild crop relatives face extinction.