Two scientists who led efforts to establish a storage vault holding more than a million seed samples were named the 2024 World Food Prize laureates on Thursday.
The World Food Prize laureate selection committee said Geoffrey Hawtin, founding director and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Cary Fowler, currently the U.S. special envoy for global food security, “played key roles in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which today holds 1.25 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species in an underground facility in the Arctic Circle.
The repository, often referred to as the ‘Doomsday Vault,’ opened in 2008 and stands as the last line of defense against threats to global food security, including pandemics and climate catastrophes.”
The two were chosen “for their longstanding contribution to seed conservation and crop biodiversity,” the World Food Prize Foundation said in a news release.
Fowler said that “while creating a global seed vault might seem logical now,” he was told that the idea was “crazy.”
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It opened in 2008, and “we’ve since managed to collect and preserve the diversity of all of the major crops, including, for example, 150,000 types of wheat now in storage. But we need more collections, particularly of indigenous crops from regions such as Africa, because the diversity of these hardy crops is the raw material for plant breeding improvements.”
Fowler, who is often referred to as the “father” of the vault, began his career in 1978 as program director at the National Sharecroppers Fund in North Carolina.
Hawtin was a member of the original study team and drew up its technical specifications. In 2004, he started the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which finances the vault with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, NordGen.
Hawtin “has helped shape the global work of the Crop Trust in many ways, and today, as a member of its executive board, he is at the forefront of shaping the future of this international organization and its role in the transformation of our agri-food systems,” said Stefan Schmitz, the trust’s executive director.
The announcement was made at the State Department.
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