Scientists Who Helped Create Global Seed Doomsday Vault Named World Food Prize Laureates

By Chris Clayton

Two scientists who played key roles in the creation of the "Doomsday Vault," a global underground seed vault in Norway, have been recognized as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates.

Cary Fowler, U.S. special envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, were each named 2024 World Food Prize laureates at a ceremony Thursday at the U.S. State Department with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The World Food Prize, which has now been awarded to 55 people, was created by Norman Borlaug, a native Iowan plant breeder who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

Hawtin and Fowler were recognized for playing key roles in creating the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called Doomsday Vault, which is set 150 meters deep in a mountain within the Artic Circle in Norway. The vault, which opened in 2008, holds roughly 1.25 million seed samples from more than 6,000 different plant species. The vault "stands as the last line of defense against threats to global food security, including pandemics and climate catastrophes," the World Food Prize noted.

In its news release, the World Food Prize said the vault was the brainchild of Fowler, who wrote to Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask its members to consider establishing such a facility during his time at the Consultive Group on International Agricultural Research, known as CGIAR, the world's largest publicly funded agricultural research organization. Fowler was later invited to chair a committee to assess the feasibility of such a project and served as the first chair of the vault's International Advisory Council.

Fowler and Hawtin also helped develop the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, or Plant Treaty, adopted in 2001 to facilitate the global movement of plant genetic resources. By codifying international agreements and mechanisms for the sharing of seeds, the treaty laid the foundations for the Svalbard seed vault.

In his brief remarks, Blinken noted a single crop, such as sorghum, can have hundreds of thousands of varieties that can be used to help when one strain is attacked by a pest infestation, making crop production more resilient in the long run. That's only possible with crop diversity "if a variety with a vital gene has not gone extinct by the time that we need it the most," Blinken said.

He added that crop biodiversity is more important now than ever, "largely because of climate change and conflict, our global food systems are under unprecedented stress."

Right now, more than 700 million people are experiencing chronic hunger, Blinken said. "They don't know where their next meal will come from. Food insecurity has devastating consequences."

Hawtin spent much of his early career and risked his life collecting, preserving and protecting species of legumes, such as chickpeas and faba beans, from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, the World Food Prize stated. These collections helped to establish the gene bank managed by the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). When civil war broke out in 1975, Hawtin was responsible for moving collections of plant genetic material six times, across a mined road and under weapons fire, from Lebanon to Syria.