Geoffrey Hawtin and Cary Fowler, founders of the “doomsday” seed bank in Norway, are this year’s winners of the $500,000 World Food Prize “for their longstanding contributions to seed conservation and crop biodiversity,” said the foundation overseeing the prize on Thursday. The scientists have been active for decades in efforts to preserve plant genetic resources, including an international plant treaty in 2001.
“They have focused their careers on preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop diversity and mobilizing this critical resource against threats of global food security,” said Terry Branstad, president of the World Food Prize Foundation. “They recognized early on that crop diversity and genetic resources are absolutely essential to long-term global food security in the face of climate change and other existential threats.”
Branstad announced Hawtin and Fowler as food prize laureates during a ceremony at the U.S. State Department. They will receive their awards during the annual World Food Prize symposium on Oct. 29-31 in Des Moines, Iowa. Hawtin is founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Fowler is U.S. special envoy for global food security.
Sometimes called the Nobel Prize of agriculture, the food prize was the brainchild of Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the founder of the “green revolution” of higher-yielding crops that helped alleviate world hunger.
Hawtin and Fowler are best known for creating the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located underground above the Arctic Circle in Norway. It holds 1.25 million seed samples from 6,000 plant species. The vault “stands as the last line of defense against threats to global food security, including pandemics, and climate catastrophes,” said the food prize foundation. The men were also instrumental in development of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in 2001, which codified international agreements on seed sharing.
“While creating a global seed vault might seem logical now, people told me at the time that the idea was crazy,” said Fowler. “We’ve since managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all 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.”
Fowler proposed the global seed vault in a letter to the Norwegian government while he was part of CGIAR, an international agricultural research network. He later led a committee to assess the feasibility of the vault. Hawtin was a member of the study team and drew up its technical specifications. In 2004, he created the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which helps fund the seed vault, along with Norway’s Agriculture Ministry and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.
Materials held in gene banks contain traits that could be used to improve crop climate resilience, disease resistance, nutritional value, and tolerance for increased salinity in the soil, said the food prize foundation.
Fowler began his career working for the National Sharecroppers Fund in North Carolina. Hawtin collected legume species in the Middle East, eventually for inclusion in a gene bank managed by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. The first withdrawal from the Svalbard seed vault, in 2015, was to repopulate seed collections in Morocco and Lebanon, and included seeds that Hawtin and his colleagues had collected years earlier.
To watch a video of the World Food Prize announcement, click here.