Two scientists instrumental in the development of an international seed bank in Norway won this year’s World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 with the help of Geoffrey Hawtin and Cary Fowler. Carved into a mountain in the Arctic Circle, the facility houses 1.25 million seed samples from more than 6,000 plant species.
Svalbard is meant to be the ultimate, long-term backup for seed banks around the world, in the event of natural disasters, funding cuts or political unrest.
“In a world of changes, we are all in this together, and a loss in any seed bank around the world is a loss for all of us,” said Fowler, part of the U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security.
Roughly 1,700 ‘genebanks’ — which can include cold storage for seeds, greenhouses and tissue cultures — work at the local, national or international level. The banks help ensure a future with culturally-relevant plants and locally-adapted crops that underpin food security, said Hawtin. They also provide the raw material for researchers and both public and private crop breeders who develop new varieties.
“With global climate change, with the environmental degradation going on today, these varieties are going to become ever more important,” Hawtin said. “We're going to need varieties that are able to tolerate higher temperatures, that are able to withstand droughts, withstand flooding. In some cases, they’re certainly going to face a whole new spectrum of pests and diseases.”
Elevating the role of genebanks
The recognition of Hawtin and Fowler by the World Food Prize Foundation draws attention to the value of genebanks, said Denise Costich. She is a former curator of the maize collection at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.
“As a genebank person, I personally felt like this is the World Food Prize that I want to experience, because it's highlighting the amazing work that we're all doing to conserve our crop genetic diversity,” Costich said. “Without that diversity, we can't go forward.”
Today, Costich is a senior research associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a board member of Seed Savers Exchange.
Based in Decorah, Iowa, it’s one of the largest nongovernmental seed banks in the U.S.
Seed Savers Exchange stewards heirloom and open-pollinated varieties for gardeners and small-scale farmers. Founded in 1975, the nonprofit’s collection has grown from two to more than 20,000 varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers, grains, nuts and herbs.
“Our collection of home grown seeds is really deemed as being globally significant,” said Cindy Goodner, the organization’s development director, noting how it’s the only nonprofit that has made a deposit to Svalbard Global Seed Vault every year since it opened.
But Seed Savers Exchange views seeds as a resource best conserved by people who use and value them. The organization encourages gardeners and small scale farmers to save, share and swap seeds, and it helps members and nonmembers connect with more than 370 seed savers across the U.S.
“The original idea of Seed Savers Exchange was to have a community of people that were safeguarding and preserving and sharing seeds,” said Mike Bollinger, its executive director.
It started in Missouri with Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy. They inherited seeds from “Grandpa Ott’s” morning glory and the “German Pink” tomato, which Diane's ancestors brought from Bavaria, Germany in 1884.
“[Diane] felt an instant connection to ancestors whom she had never met and was inspired to begin a career of gardening and seed saving,” Goodner said.
Fowler, the new World Food Prize recipient, wrote the first funding proposal for Seed Savers Exchange while he was program director at the National Sharecroppers Fund in the 1970s. Later, he joined the board of Seed Savers.
A call for more resources
Seeds have a lifespan. The length of that lifespan depends on the species and variety and the conditions they’re stored in. But eventually, they need to be planted to produce the next generation of viable seed.
Bollinger said the nonprofit’s ability to regenerate seeds is limited by funding thresholds and inflation, even as they expand the collection through donations.
“Diversity is really the foundation of our agricultural food system, and so it's important to preserve that. And I think the beauty of [the World Food Prize] award happening now is that it is really highlighting it at a time when resources are often limited,” Bollinger said.
It’s an issue Hawtin, the newly minted World Food Prize recipient, is also highlighting. He said many genebanks need more financial support to maintain decades of work.
“We think of a genebank as being a safe haven, but it’s only a safe haven as long as you can continue to pay for the electricity,” he said.
Hawtin helped create Crop Trust, primarily to provide emergency funds to genebanks around the world. Fowler expanded the funding and mission to rescue at-risk repositories and collect crop wild relatives, which the laureates say is becoming increasingly important with habitat loss and climate change.
The USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System released a 10-year plan in 2023, laying out goals for more funding, space to store and regenerate plant material, and staff, especially with expertise to conserve wild species. The agency said this would help reduce and prevent backlogs at the 22 genebanks it runs across the country, maintaining over 600,000 samples that represent over 1,700 different plant species.
One of those genebanks, the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa, houses more than 60,000 samples of corn, cucumbers, squash, carrots, amaranth, quinoa, woody ornamentals and medicinal plants.
Geneticist and corn curator, Vivian Bernau, said there are many reasons why a collection could be lost or diminished. Collaborating with other genebanks and sharing resources ensures they don’t disappear.
“Having materials in different places gives us multiple places to go back to to replenish that material,” she said.
Bernau grew up in Iowa and participated in the World Food Prize youth programs, but the laureate selection this year resonates in a new way.
“It's just very exciting for this to be the year of genebanks and the World Food Prize laureates to come from the gene banking world," Bernau said. It's very special for us.”
Disclosure: The reporter interned at the World Food Prize in 2013 and was a junior communications consultant at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico in 2018.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
