Seeds at the center of the 2024 World Food Prize

Seeds are the key to growing food that feeds the world. At times those seeds are not sown in ideal conditions but in dry soils or areas that are torn by war and famine.

Preserving crop diversity for future generations takes a kind of vision and perseverance that these two researchers and advocates have gladly shouldered.

Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin grew up in north London, spending summers on local farms. His PhD in plant genetics led to work with a food legume program that collects and preserves varieties of chickpeas, fava beans, lentils and more, from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. 

In 1975, as a civil war broke out in Lebanon, Hawtin and his team saved this irreplaceable resource, making multiple trips down potholed, land mined roads to move the entire collection safely into Syria. In the 1990s Haughton transformed a modest program focused on gene banks into an independent, multi dimensional CGIAR center, creating the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, later renamed Bioversity International. The group's institutional strategy is to conserve agricultural biodiversity and use it to improve food security and sustainability.

Dr. Cary Fowler, born in Tennessee, also spent much of his youth working on farms. His research into social justice issues and agriculture around the loss of crop diversity led him to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1990s. He eventually became the head of the FAO’s program for Plant Genetic Resources and prepared the UN's first assessment of the world's Plant Genetic Resources which led to pivotal negotiations resulting in the adoption of a global plan of action for conserving agricultural biodiversity. This achievement laid the groundwork for a worldwide gene bank management plan on which he would collaborate with Hawtin. 

During the 1990s and 2000s, Fowler led efforts to revolutionize global seed conservation and the creation of a crop trust. With a plan in hand, he approached the Norwegian government with an idea to create an international seed vault near the North Pole. 

Dr. Fowler: We created a facility that operates like a safety deposit box, where Norway owns the mountain, owns the facility. But the depositor owns whatever they deposit  and only they have access to that. And by the way, it's free. So I tried to explain to countries that it's a free insurance policy. You know, why not take advantage of it? It's still not been easy to convince every country to use it, but we're getting there.”

Fowler led the negotiations for opening the vault and secured support from national and international gene banks, serving nine years as the chair of the International Advisory Council for what became the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Meanwhile, Haughton developed technical management and policy specifications for the vault. 

Dr. Fowler:  “We're concerned about trying to help countries develop more sustainable, productive agricultural systems that feed everyone all year round.”

The vault would open in 2008 and began accepting seeds from other gene banks under the auspices of the International Plant Treaty that had been negotiated by the United Nations.

Today, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault safeguards 1.25 million seed samples representing over 6,000 species from nearly every country on earth. It is the largest and most diverse collection of crop biodiversity in existence.

At The Borlaug Dialogues in late October, the pair were featured in panels and press events before being honored at the annual World Food Prize award ceremony.

Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin: it's not just the recognition of the work we've done so much as the recognition of this whole issue of the importance of genetic diversity and what it means and how it underpins our ability to  feed the world in the future with nutritious food. So it's a topic which is not widely understood. Not many people, if you talk if you mentioned sort of perversity, would have a clue what you were talking about until you say, well, if you go to your local supermarket, you've got lots of different apples. Rochester. And then you say, well, there's actually 150,000 different samples of rice. Rice in a gene bank in the Philippines. This is the diversity we're talking about.”

Contact: Paul.Yeager@iowapbs.org