‘We will feed the world in 50 years’: Scientists behind giant seed vault win World Food Prize
Two men who were instrumental in creating a global seed vault designed to safeguard the world’s agricultural diversity will be honoured as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates.
Cary Fowler, the US special envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist from the UK and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will be awarded the annual prize and split a $500,000 (€464,000) award.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken lauded the men for their “critical role in preserving crop diversity” at seed banks around the world.
They also helped ideate a global seed vault which now protects over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants.
‘Doomsday vault’: A global seed bank to safeguard food security
In 2004, Fowler and Hawtin led the effort to build a backup vault of the world’s crop seeds in a place where it could be safe from political upheaval and environmental changes.
The facility was built into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle where temperatures could ensure seeds would be preserved.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault – also known as the ‘Doomsday vault’ – opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world.
Fowler, who first proposed establishing the seed vault in Norway, said his idea was initially met with puzzlement by the leaders of seed banks in some countries.
“To a lot of people today, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It’s a valuable natural resource and you want to offer robust protection for it,” he says.
“Fifteen years ago, shipping a lot of seeds to the closest place to the North Pole that you can fly into, putting them inside a mountain – that’s the craziest idea anybody ever had.”
Hundreds of smaller seed banks have existed in other countries for many decades, but Fowler says he was motivated by a concern that climate change would throw agriculture into turmoil, making a plentiful seed supply even more essential.
Climate change is threatening crops and food supplies
Hawtin says that alongside existing crop threats, such as insects, diseases and land degradation, climate change heightened the need for a secure, backup seed vault.
In part, that’s because climate change has the potential of making those earlier problems even worse.
“You end up with an entirely new spectrum of pests and diseases under different climate regimes,” Hawtin says.
“Climate change is putting a whole lot of extra problems on what has always been significant ones.”
‘We will feed the world in 50 years’
Fowler and Hawtin say they hope their selection as World Food Prize laureates will enable them to push for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for seed bank endowments around the world.
Maintaining those operations is relatively cheap, especially when considering how essential they are to ensuring a plentiful food supply, but the funding needs continue forever.
“This is really a chance to get that message out and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years,” Hawtin says.
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 starvation in many countries.
The accolade will be awarded at the annual Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, held 29-31 October in Des Moines.
