World Food Prize winners honored for the global seed vault

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

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At a ceremony on May 9 at the US Department of State, the World Food Prize Foundation honored two scientists who were instrumental in creating the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for their work in crop conservation and biodiversity. As 2024 laureates, 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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The repository, also known as the ‘doomsday’ vault, was opened in 2008 as a backup for gene banks around the world. The “treasuries of plant genetic resources” have the potential to help researchers, plant breeders and farmers develop varieties that are resilient to climate change, disease and war, and ultimately protect global food security.

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

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Fowler, the US special envoy for global food security, had originally proposed the facility. His contributions “will benefit future generations,” said Anne Bethe Kristiansen Tvinnereim, Minister of International Development and Minister of Nordic Cooperation for Norway.

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

“While creating a global seed vault may seem logical now, at the time people told me it was a crazy idea,” Fowler said. “Since then we have managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all major crops, including for example the 150,000 varieties of wheat now in storage. But we need more collections, especially of native crops from regions like Africa, because the diversity of these hardy crops is the raw material for improvements in plant breeding. I hope that the World Food Prize will inspire investments in this kind of transformational R&D, which will be necessary for food and nutrition security for 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, collecting varieties of chickpeas, broad beans and lentils. During the Lebanese Civil War, his conservation work involved driving genetic plant material onto mine roads with gunfire in the distance.

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

“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 endangered as pandas and rhinos,” says Hawtin. “With this honor, I would like to appeal for urgent and sustainable funding for the more than 1,700 gene banks around the world that work tirelessly to ensure that the material farmers and plant breeders need is preserved and available. The work of crop gene banks underpins our ability to feed the world today, and will continue to do so in the future.”

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