World Food Prize winners honored for creating global seed vault

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On the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Circle, 120 meters deep in permafrost and rock, an underground vault protects 1.25 million seed samples from more than 6,000 plant species, “with room for millions further”.

At a ceremony held on May 9 at the US Department of State, the World Food Prize Foundation honored two scientists who were instrumental in the creation of the Svalbard World Seed Vault for their work in crop conservation and biodiversity. As 2024 recipients, Geoffrey Hawtin of Canada and the United Kingdom and Cary Fowler of the United States will share the $500,000 prize.

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Dubbed the “end of the world” vault, the repository opened in 2008 as a backup for gene banks around the world. “Treasures of plant genetic resources” have the potential to help researchers, plant breeders and farmers develop varieties that resist climate change, disease and war, ultimately protecting global food security.

Scientists first retreated from the vault in 2015 to reconstruct seed collections damaged during the Syrian civil war, which included samples Hawtin and his team collected decades earlier.

Fowler, the US special envoy for global food security, originally proposed the facility. His contributions “will benefit generations to come,” said Anne Beathe Kristiansen Tvinnereim, Norway’s minister of international development and minister of Nordic cooperation.

Although Hawtin and Fowler are now honored for their work on the Svalbard vault, it was not always so well received.

“While creating a global seed vault may seem logical now, people told me at the time that the idea was crazy,” Fowler said. “Since then we have managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all major crops, including, for example, 150,000 types of wheat that are now in storage. But we need more collections, particularly of indigenous crops from regions like Africa, because the diversity of these resistant crops is the raw material for improved plant breeding. I hope that the World Food Prize will inspire investments in this type of transformative R&D, which will be necessary for the food and nutrition security of 10 billion people by 2050.”

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After graduating from Cambridge University, Hawtin led teams in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, harvesting varieties of chickpeas, fava beans and lentils. During the Lebanese Civil War, his conservation work involved driving plant genetic material down mined roads with gunshots from a distance.

Hawtin, former director of the Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Sciences Division at Canada’s International Development Research Centre, founded the non-profit Global Crop Diversity Trust in 2004 (which funds the vault with Norwegian authorities) and He was part of the original Svalbard study team.

“The genetic diversity of crops and their relatives is as important for biodiversity as it is for food security, and many of them are as threatened as pandas and rhinos,” Hawtin said. “As I receive 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 who are working tirelessly to ensure that the material that farmers and plant breeders need is conserved and continued. available. “The work of crop genebanks underpins our ability to feed the world today and will continue to do so in the future.”

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