Devex Dish: World Food Prize goes to creators of ‘doomsday’ arctic seed vault

For their role in creating the arctic facility that preserves a backup collection of the world’s seed banks, two scientists have received the biggest prize in food and agriculture: this year’s World Food Prize.

Cary Fowler, currently the U.S. special envoy for global food security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, the founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, were instrumental in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008, as well as working out the international legal framework that allows for the transfer and storage of plant genetic material from nearly every country. Today, it contains more than 1.25 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species from across the globe.

Considered the Nobel Prize of food and agriculture, the World Food Prize comes with a $500,000 award. They’ll be honored at a ceremony this October in Des Moines, Iowa, during the Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue.

In an interview with my colleague Tania Karas earlier this month, the pair were clearly very touched.

“I think when we first really started to put plans together for the seed vault that eventually was built in Norway, there were more than a few people that thought that this was some grand folly,” Fowler says.

“It’s a great honor but it’s also extremely humbling. We’re two of thousands of people involved,” Hawtin says, adding that they were “standing on the shoulders of giants” such as Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian scientist known as the father of genebanks.

Fowler originally proposed the idea for the vault to Norway. It was built under a thick layer of permafrost and rock in an environment cold enough that the seeds will survive even if the electricity is cut off. And Hawtin helped establish the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which finances the Svalbard Vault along with other seed banks around the world. Fowler became the crop trust’s first executive director.

The vault is a means of safeguarding crop biodiversity in the face of climate change, war, or pandemics — but it doesn’t just exist for “doomsday” scenarios, which is why its two founders are not so fond of the facility’s nickname.

“People don't understand that extinction is a process. It's not an event,” Fowler says. “Extinction doesn't really happen when the last individual dies. It happens when the species loses the ability to evolve. And what we've tried to do is to conserve all the options for the future for our agricultural crops that will enable them to evolve in a rapidly changing world, particularly with climate change and all of the impacts that that will have. We're trying to keep the options alive.”

And that definitely seems worth a prize.

Read: Scientists behind arctic 'doomsday' seed vault win World Food Prize

Related: How hyperlocal seed banks are building climate-resilient agriculture

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Devil in the details

The dangers of methane emissions — which have 80 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide — finally seemed to grab international attention in 2021, when more than 150 countries signed a pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

Roughly 60% of anthropogenic methane emissions come from the food system, whether its livestock, food waste and loss, or rice cultivation, so it seemed pretty straightforward that hitting the reduction targets would mean addressing some of these issues within food systems.

But there are still key gaps, Ertharin Cousin, the former head of the World Food Programme, and Shenggen Fan, the dean of the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy at China Agricultural University, write in an opinion piece for Devex. Of particular concern is a lack of information about how methane mitigation activities actually impact nutrition. But they are also concerned:

• First, that the private sector is not being integrated into these efforts nearly enough.

• About the need for context-based approaches that take into account the trade-offs between reducing methane and ensuring people are getting enough nutrients.

• About the obligation to have more consideration about the impact methane reduction policies might be having on farmers.

Opinion: Reducing food methane pollution without compromising nutrition

Soiled

Leaders from across Africa have agreed to triple fertilizer use on the continent and get much more of it in the hands of smallholder farmers by 2034.

Though Africa contains 60% of the world’s arable land, yields are lower than they could be because the soil has been overused and fertilizer is too expensive or not easily available to smallholder farmers. That contributes to the pockets of food insecurity that exist on the continent.

So it made sense that the participants at the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, including several heads of state, agreed on the need to make fertilizer more available and boost local production. It will help improve their yields, but also contribute to reversing land degradation and improving soil health, Devex contributor Anthony Langat reports.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because similar promises were made at the last such summit held back in 2006 in Abuja, Nigeria. This time, though, the climate change threat is much more obvious. The funding piece will be key to carrying out the policies and plans African leaders committed to.

But in the background of the summit was a debate over what kind of fertilizer — organic or chemical — should be used, and civil society representatives warned that chemical fertilizers are not a magic bullet for the continent’s soil health and food insecurity woes.

Civil society representatives also said they were locked out of discussions of the 10-year plans for fertilizer and soil health in the lead-up to the summit. Some were advocates of agroecology and want to prioritize the use of biofertilizers that use living cells like bacteria or fungi to improve nutrients, rather than chemical or mineral fertilizers. They blame those inorganic fertilizers for actually making soil more acidic and less productive.

Read: African leaders pledge to triple fertilizer use to improve soil quality

+ Devex Pro members can dig deeper into the debate around organic vs. inorganic fertilizers with these articles:

• Food crisis: Mineral fertilizers 'here to stay,' says IFDC
• Global shortage renews fertilizer debate in Africa amid rising hunger

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Chew on this

Israeli protesters destroy food packages heading to Gaza. [BBC]

Extreme weather could threaten the United Kingdom’s food security, with reports that self-sufficiency across all farming sectors has already dropped from an average of 86% in 2022 to 78% this year following a particularly soggy winter. [FOOD Manufacture]

Artificial intelligence may become a key tool in improving crop yields in Ghana, where young people are experimenting with drones that use AI support for spraying and watering and other tools that help identify crop infestation. [DW]

The International Fund for Agricultural Development, which funds and sponsors initiatives to address poverty and hunger, has entered the Australian dollar market with a bond that will help small-scale farmers grow production and build climate resilience. [IFAD]