The two men behind the so-called “doomsday vault” store 1.25 million seed samples – seeds that could be used to rebuild much of the world's food supply in the event of a catastrophe. – is this year's winner of the $500,000 World Food Prize.
Cary Fowler, U.S. special envoy for global food security, and Jeffrey Hawtin, founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, received awards for their efforts to establish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Arctic.
Fowler, a Tennessee native, said many people thought creating a Svalbard Seed Vault was a crazy idea. But since opening in 2008, it has managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all major crops, including “150,000 varieties of wheat” and an equal number of varieties of rice.
According to the Des Moines-based World Food Prize Foundation, Hawtin is involved in collecting, preserving and protecting chickpea, fava bean and other legume seeds from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. He says he spent much of his early career even risking his own life. .
Hawtin said maintaining genetic diversity in crops is key to food security, and many strains are “as endangered as pandas and rhinos.”
The award, established by Iowa native Norman Borlaug and doubling last year's $250,000, will be awarded at the culmination of the World Food Prize Conference in Des Moines, Oct. 29-31. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, World Food Prize Foundation President Terry Branstad and others announced the award Thursday in Washington, D.C.
Here's what you need to know about the prizes and winners.
What is the World Food Prize?
Borlaug, who founded the World Food Prize organization in 1986, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his research leading to the creation of drought-tolerant, high-yielding wheat varieties. He is credited as the “father of the Green Revolution” who saved one billion people from hunger.
Borlaug created the award, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of agriculture, to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to improving the quality and quantity of food around the world.
Former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who served as President Donald Trump's ambassador to China and served as the longest-serving governor in U.S. history before stepping down, will become chairman of the World Food Prize Foundation in 2023.
Why is the World Food Prize Foundation honoring Fowler and Hawtin?
They helped shape the treaty, now called the Plant Treaty, adopted in 2001, allowing the movement of plant genetic material around the world and providing the basis for the Svalbard repository.
The vault is buried deep in the mountains beneath permafrost. The Norwegian government is running the project in collaboration with the regional gene bank Nordic Genetic Resource Center, called NordGen, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, called Crop Trust. Fowler was the first executive director of the Crop Trust.
What's going on in Svalbard's seed vault?
This vault holds duplicate copies of each country's seed collection samples and is backed up against losses that may occur due to natural disasters, war, fire, floods, equipment failure, etc. Thanks to permafrost, the temperature is kept at -18 degrees Celsius.
With space for 4.5 million seed samples, the vault supports 1,700 gene banks around the world and has been called “the ultimate insurance for the world's food supply.”
“The Seed Vault underpins the work of seed banks around the world,” said the 30-year-old, who was awarded an OBE in 2017 for his work in global agro-biodiversity and sustainable food programmes. Hawtin said.
“They're not just collecting material; they're distributing it to researchers and growers to make it available, and they're learning about it,” he said.
“In a very real sense, the safe allows them to carry out very important day-to-day tasks with confidence,” he said.
Have the stored seeds been collected yet?
Already, Syrian scientists who were forced to leave Syria in 2014 due to the civil war are using seeds stored in the country. Scientists based in Morocco and Lebanon are rebuilding resources such as barley, lentils and chickpeas.
Hawtin said he was recently in Morocco and saw seeds from Svalbard being grown in the fields.
“It was being tested for things like drought tolerance, for example,” he said. “In the coming years, new varieties will be explored.
“In a very real sense, it's contributing to today…it's not just future activities,” he said.
Fowler added: “This not only ensures the collection of different seed banks around the world, but also, in a way, ends the extinction caused by agricultural diversity.”
Is the Svalbard Seed Vault primarily a long-term insurance policy?
“Some people ask us how we're going to get there and extract the seeds when the day comes for humanity to go extinct,” Fowler said, adding that the “somewhat flippant answer” is, “Don't worry…we'll get there.” added. you. “
“While I think most of the nickname Doomsday is inaccurate, there is a grain of truth in it,” Fowler said. “Yes, if there was a global or regional catastrophe, do you think the seed vault would be invaluable and useful? … Absolutely.
“But it wasn't actually built with the expectation that an asteroid would hit Earth or anything like that,” he says. “It was built to address the almost daily real-world problems we experience in seed banks around the world.”
