Men behind doomsday seed vault in Arctic win World Food Prize

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — When Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin started thinking about ways to prevent hunger and protect the world’s food supply, they came up with what Fowler called “the craziest idea anyone has ever had”: a world seed vault built on the side of an arctic mountain.

About 20 years ago, Fowler, now the US special envoy for global food security, and Hawtin, a UK agricultural scientist, envisioned the so-called “doomsday vault” as a backup location for seeds that could be used for produce new seeds. crops if existing seed banks were threatened by war, climate change or other disruptions. On Thursday, officials in Washington announced that Fowler and Hawtin would be appointed in 2024. Laureates of the World Food Prize For his job.

“To many people today, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “It is a valuable natural resource and must be offered solid protection,” she said in an interview from Saudi Arabia. “Fifteen years ago, sending a bunch of seeds to the closest place you could fly to the North Pole and putting them inside a mountain was the craziest idea anyone ever had.”

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, opened in 2008 and now contains 1.25 million seed samples from almost every country. The largely concrete structure, built into a mountainside, provides genetic protection for more than 6,000 varieties of culturally important crops and plants.

Fowler and Hawtin were named winners of the annual award at the State Department, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the men for their “critical role in preserving crop diversity.”

They will receive the annual award this fall in Des Moines, Iowa, where the food award foundation is based, and will share a $500,000 prize.

Hundreds of smaller seed banks have existed for many decades in other countries, but Fowler said they were motivated by concerns that climate change would throw agriculture into disarray, making an abundant supply of seeds even more essential.

Hawtin, an executive board member of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said there were many threats to crops, such as insects, disease and land degradation, as well as political unrest, but climate change increased the need for secure support. seed vault. In part, this is because climate change has the potential to make those previous problems even worse.

“You end up with a whole new spectrum of pests and diseases under different climate regimes,” Hawtin said in an interview from southwest England. “Climate change is raising many additional problems to those that have always been important.”

Fowler and Hawtin said they hope their selection as World Food Prize winners will allow them to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for seed bank donations around the world. Maintaining those operations is relatively cheap, especially considering how essential they are to ensuring an abundant food supply, but funding needs continue forever.

“This is really an opportunity to spread that message and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we’ll be able to feed the world in 50 years,” Hawtin said.

The World Food Prize was founded by Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased crop yields and reduced the threat of famine in many countries. The culinary award will be presented at the annual Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, October 29-31 in Des Moines.