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 role in preserving crop diversity” at seed banks around the world and at a global seed vault, which now protects over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants.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. “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 said he was motivated by a concern that climate change would …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnDES 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 role in preserving crop diversity” at seed banks around the world and at a global seed vault, which now protects over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants.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. “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 said he was motivated by a concern that climate change would …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
