World Food Prize goes to 2 who helped protect vital seeds in an Arctic Circle vault
DES MOINES, Iowa — Two men who were instrumental in the “craziest idea anyone ever had” to create a global seed vault designed to protect the world’s agricultural diversity will be honored as laureates of the 2024 World Food Prize, it said. officials announced in Washington on Thursday.
Cary Fowler, the US Special Envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, a UK agricultural scientist and member of the board of directors of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will receive the annual award this fall in Des Moines, Iowa , where the Food Prices Foundation is located. They will split a $500,000 reward.
The award winners were announced at the State Department, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the men for their “critical work to promote global crop biodiversity and conserve more than 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants, which has had a direct impact on tackling hunger around the world.”
Fowler and Hawtin, beginning in about 2004, were leaders in the effort to build a reserve vault of the world’s crop seeds in a place where it could be safe from political unrest and environmental change. A location was chosen on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures allowed the seeds to be safely stored in a facility built into the side of a mountain.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 and now contains 1.25 million seed samples from almost every country in the world.
Fowler, who first proposed setting up the seed vault in Norway, said his idea was initially met with confusion among seed bank leaders in some countries.
“To many people today it sounds like something very reasonable. It is a valuable natural resource and you want to provide robust protection for it,” he said in an interview from Saudi Arabia. “Fifteen years ago, transporting a lot of seeds to the nearest place you can fly to the North Pole and putting them in a mountain – that’s the craziest idea anyone ever had.”
Hundreds of smaller seed banks have existed in other countries for decades, but Fowler said he was motivated by concerns that climate change would throw agriculture into turmoil, making an abundant seed supply even more important.
Hawtin said there were numerous existing crop threats, such as insects, diseases and land degradation, but climate change was increasing the need for a secure reserve seed vault. In part, that’s because climate change has the potential to make those previous problems worse.
“You get a whole new spectrum of pests and diseases under different climate regimes,” Hawtin said in an interview from south-west England. “Climate change adds a lot of additional problems to the problems that have always been significant.”
Fowler and Hawtin said they hope their selection as World Food Prize laureates will allow them to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding from seed banks around the world. Sustaining these activities is relatively inexpensive, especially considering how vital they are to ensuring an abundant food supply, but the financing needs remain in perpetuity.
“This is really an opportunity to get that message out there and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that will feed the world 50 years from now,” Hawtin said.
The World Food Prize was founded by Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his part in the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased crop yields and reduced the threat of famine in many countries. The food award will be presented during the annual Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, held Oct. 29-31 in Des Moines.