Founders of the Global Seed Vault to receive award for work preserving seeds
Dr. Cary Fowler, left, and Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin.
For more information, see the Third Quarter issue of Seed Today.
Two scientists who were instrumental in creating a back-up vault of the world’s crop seeds to protect global food security have been named the 2024 World Food Prize Laureates.
Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin OBE, founding director and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Dr. Cary Fowler, currently the U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security, were chosen in May by the World Food Prize Laureate Selection Committee for their longstanding contribution to seed conservation and crop biodiversity. The award will be presented in October in Des Moines, IA.
Establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
The two men played key roles in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which today holds 1.25 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species in an underground facility in the Arctic Circle. The repository, often referred to as the “Doomsday Vault,” opened in 2008 and stands as the last line of defense against threats to global food security, including pandemics and climate catastrophes.
Fowler and Hawtin played pivotal roles in the development of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, or Plant Treaty, which was adopted in 2001, to facilitate the global movement of plant genetic resources. By codifying international agreements and mechanisms for the sharing of seeds, the treaty laid the foundations for the Svalbard seed vault.
The vault was the brainchild of Fowler, who wrote to Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask them to consider establishing such a facility during his time at CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded agricultural research organization. He was later invited to chair a committee to assess the feasibility of such a project and served as the first Chair of the Vault’s International Advisory Council.
“Dr. Fowler’s many contributions to food security are truly global and entrepreneurial in scale, scope and design – changing peoples’ lives,” says Anne Beathe Kristiansen Tvinnereim, Minister of International Development and Minister of Nordic Cooperation, Norway. “One of his many legacies, the global seed vault at Svalbard in Norway, will benefit generations to come and his name will linger on.”
Meanwhile, Hawtin served as a member of the original study team, scoping the viability of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and drew up its technical specifications. In 2004, Hawtin created the Global Crop Diversity Trust, or Crop Trust, which now finances the vault alongside the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, NordGen.
Crucial Resources
Genebanks, including the Svalbard Vault, are crucial resources for crop scientists, who breed and develop improved varieties of the world’s most important food crops. Material held in genebanks contains beneficial traits with the potential to improve crops’ climate resilience, disease resistance, nutritional value and tolerance to increased salinity, which is increasingly valuable in the face of climate change.
“While creating a global seed vault might seem logical now, people told me at the time that the idea was crazy,” says Fowler. “We’ve since managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all of the major crops, including, for example, 150,000 types of wheat now in storage. But we need more collections, particularly of indigenous crops from regions such as Africa, because the diversity of these hardy crops is the raw material for plant breeding improvements.”
“The genetic diversity of crops and their relatives is as important to biodiversity as it is to food security, and much of it is as endangered as pandas and rhinos,” Hawtin says. “In receiving this honor, I would like to make a call to arms for urgent and sustained funding for the more than 1,700 genebanks around the world that are working tirelessly to make sure the material that farmers and plant breeders need is conserved and remains available. The work of crop genebanks underpins our ability to feed the world today and will do so long into the future.”