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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world.
Two men who are instrumental in creating a global seed vault designed to safeguard the world’s agricultural diversity will be honored as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates.
Cary Fowler, the US special envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist from the UK and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will be awarded the annual prize and split a $500,000 (€464,000) award.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken lauded the men for their “critical role in preserving crop diversity” at seed banks around the world.
Fowler, who first proposed establishing the seed vault in Norway, said his idea was initially met with 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 says.
“Fifteen years ago, shipping a lot of seeds to the closest place to the North Pole that you can fly into, putting them inside a mountain – that’s the craziest idea anybody ever had.”
Hundreds of smaller seed banks have existed in other countries for many decades, but Fowler says he was motivated by a concern that climate change would throw agriculture into turmoil, making a plentiful seed supply even more essential.
Fowler and Hawtin say they hope their selection as World Food Prize laureates will enable them to push for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for seed bank endowments around the world.
Maintaining those operations is relatively cheap, especially when considering how essential they are to ensuring a plentiful food supply, but the funding needs continue forever.
