North Macedonia’s Professor Races to Save Vanishing Crops

Professor Mirjana Jankulovska and her team in North Macedonia are collecting and preserving traditional crop varieties from across the country. Over the past fifteen years, they have gathered around 10,000 seed samples representing 80 plant species from over 600 villages, relying on personal visits and often their own funds.

The team discovered unique variations of common crops like aubergines with thorns, among the oldest known varieties, and beans with unusual numbers of leaflets, some never before documented. Jankulovska warns that local crop diversity is rapidly disappearing as modern agriculture expands.

She emphasizes the importance of these seeds for adaptation to climate change and preserving cultural heritage, as they hold traditional knowledge and recipes. While they have sent over 5,000 samples to foreign gene banks, the team hopes to secure long-term funding and national support to continue their work and ultimately deposit a “security collection” in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.