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

Two agricultural scientists known as the fathers of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an arctic facility that safeguards the world’s seed varieties to protect global food security, have won the 2024 World Food Prize. Cary Fowler, who currently serves as the U.S. special envoy for global food security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, the founding director and executive board member of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will share the $500,000 prize. The annual award, which is considered the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture, goes to an individual or individuals who are confronting global hunger by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food. Fowler and Hawtin played key roles in establishing the repository, as well as the international legal framework that enables the transfer and storage of plant genetic material from nearly every country. The facility, located on a remote Norwegian archipelago, is often referred to as the “doomsday vault” because it’s the last line of defense against threats to global food security such as climate change, war, and pandemics — though Fowler and Hawtin say they don’t particularly like that title. The prize selection committee chose the pair of scientists for this year’s award due to their “longstanding contribution to seed conservation and crop biodiversity,” the World Food Prize Foundation said in a press release Thursday. “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 told Devex. “So it's quite touching, really, to have people in our field — we don't actually know who they are, the selection panel is anonymous — who've seen fit to recognize this body of work.” “It’s a great honor but it’s also extremely humbling. We’re two of thousands of people involved,” Hawtin said, adding that they were “standing on the shoulders of giants” such as Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian scientist known as the father of genebanks. The World Food Prize was established by Norman E. Borlaug, an American agronomist who was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work that improved agricultural outputs which was called the Green Revolution. Past recipients include Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina, and former United Nations coordinator for global food security David Nabarro. The Svalbard repository, which opened in 2008, is a backup collection of the world’s seed banks — making it a kind of ultimate insurance policy for the global food supply. Today, it contains more than 1.25 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species from nearly every country. The samples are stored in an underground facility in Svalbard, a Norwegian island halfway between mainland Europe and the North Pole, beneath a thick layer of permafrost and rock. That environment keeps them at the optimal temperature of 18 below zero degrees Celsius, and the permafrost ensures the seeds’ continued viability even if the electricity should fail. It was Fowler who proposed the creation of the arctic facility to Norway and then headed the committee that developed the plan to establish it. Seed banks are troves of plant genetic material, and they’re important tools for crop scientists to develop and breed food crops. That genetic material contains the traits scientists need to improve crops’ resilience to climate change and disease, as well as their nutritional value. Safeguarding the world’s crop diversity is also necessary for the world’s food and nutrition security — yet we are losing the diversity of crops and their wild relatives at an alarming rate. Once heirloom varieties or wild crop relatives are gone, they’re gone forever. Preserving crop diversity is “at once completely fundamental to the practice of agriculture, to food security and our own survival and success on planet Earth,” Fowler told Devex. “At a certain point, we and everyone in this field really had recognized that we were losing crop diversity, both in the field but also in genebanks,” Fowler added of why the Svalbard facility was needed. “We were losing diversity that we were in the process of conserving — when problems would occur in seed banks, for instance.” Those losses were also the impetus for the creation of Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving global crops by supporting the world’s genebanks. The organization, established by Hawtin and his team in 2004, now finances the Svalbard Vault along with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, NordGen. Hawtin and Fowler were also instrumental in developing the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, or Plant Treaty, in 2001. It provided the legal foundation for the Svalbard Vault by establishing a system to provide farmers, plant breeders, and scientists with access to genetic materials and ensure that everyone benefits from sharing these genetic materials. Fowler and Hawtin expressed surprise that the seed bank has captured so much international media attention. But they acknowledge that its characterization as a “doomsday” vault helped, even if they say it’s a “misnomer.” “It's conserving this material for future use. It's not a museum exercise, it's not a storage of material forever — it's there so that that material can contribute to development,” Hawtin said. “And that's more and more needed than ever, with climate change, with growing populations, with new pests and diseases coming in. So that material is going to be extremely valuable, not just the material itself, but material into the genebanks around the world.” The need for backups was also obvious during the Syrian civil war, when the contents of an international seed bank near Aleppo called ICARDA were lost in the conflict. That collection — which contained tens of thousands of unique varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, and fava — was able to be rebuilt in Lebanon and Morocco using backups from the Svalbard seed bank. It was the first withdrawal from Svalbard. The two World Food Prize winners were announced on Thursday at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. Fowler and Hawtin will be honored at a ceremony this October in Des Moines, Iowa, during the Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, a week of events dedicated to exploring solutions to food insecurity and hunger. “The World Food Prize is bestowed to individuals for recognition of their achievements in the fight against hunger and food insecurity – one of the most pressing issues of our time,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday. “They have done critical work to advance global crop biodiversity and conserve over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants which has had a direct impact in addressing hunger around the world.” That the Svalbard facility contains so many samples is a credit to the many people who collected the original seeds, Fowler said. “When it first started, I thought if we got 200,000 or maybe 300,000 samples, the whole effort would have been worthwhile, and we could declare success,” Fowler said. “I never imagined the amount we have now. Those were all collected from farmers, by scientists, and they were conserved in genebanks.”