World Food Prize goes to 2 who helped protect vital seeds in an Arctic Circle vault
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Two men who were instrumental in the “craziest idea anyone ever had” of creating a global seed vault designed to safeguard the world's agricultural diversity will be honored as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates, officials announced Thursday in Washington.
Cary Fowler, the U.S. special envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist from the United Kingdom and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will be awarded the annual prize this fall in Des Moines, Iowa, where the food prize foundation is based. They will split a $500,000 award.
The winners of the prize were named at the State Department, where Secretary or State Antony Blinken lauded the men for their “critical work to advance global crop biodiversity and conserve over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants, which has had a direct impact in addressing hunger around the world.”
Fowler and Hawtin were leaders in effort starting about 2004 to build a back-up vault of the world's crop seeds at a spot where it could be safe from political upheaval and environmental changes. A location was chosen on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle where temperatures could ensure seeds could be kept safe in a facility built into the side of a mountain.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world.
Fowler, who first proposed establishing the seed vault in Norway, said his idea initially was met by puzzlement by the leaders of seed banks in some countries.
“To a lot of people today, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's a valuable natural resource and you want to offer robust protection for it,” he said in an interview from Saudi Arabia....