The U.S. special envoy for Global Food Security and an agricultural scientist from the U.K. will be awarded the annual prize this fall in Des Moines, Iowa
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 honoured as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates, officials announced Thursday in Washington.
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.
“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. “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.”
“You end up with an entirely new spectrum of pests and diseases under different climate regimes,” Hawtin said in an interview from southwest England. “Climate change is putting a whole lot of extra problems on what has always been significant ones.”
Prize Seed Hawtin Lot Fowler Funding Food Antony Blinken Arctic Circle Des Moines
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