WL Meets: World Food Prize winner, Dr Geoff Hawtin

Crop biodiversity is our insurance policy for the future of farming, globally. The genetic variety in countless seed types will hopefully ensure that our food system is resilient to the ravages of climate change, disease and pollution. And preserving our global stock of crops has been the life work of a remarkably unassuming person, Dr Geoff Hawtin, who has now received the World Food Prize.      

Few people globally have done more for the cause of plant genetic resources over the past four decades than Dr Hawtin. You may not recognise his name, but you’ll probably have heard of his most memorable achievement – the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which he helped set up in 2008. Now home to more than 1.3 million seed samples, and growing, the vault will ensure our food supply is safe in the future.  

Built into the side of a mountain on Spitsbergen on a remote Norwegian archipelago, deep in the permafrost at -18 degrees Celsius, is humankind’s ultimate backup facility for crop diversity, 130 metres below ground, boxes of crop seeds line the walls of icy caverns. Back in 2008, along with Cary Fowler, Dr Hawtin helped set up this vault north of the Arctic Circle, in a bid to protect global food security and biodiversity by storing the world’s seed deep underground. 

The vault stores duplicates of seed samples from crops around the world. It’s a safeguard against catastrophic loss in their country of origin, whether it’s pearl millet from Zambia, black beans from Brazil, wheat and barley that grows on the high Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, or British onions and brassicas. More than 80 countries are now represented in the seed vault and the list is growing.  

Putting crop biodiversity on the map

Just a few weeks ago Geoff Hawtin and Cary Fowler received the renowned global prize in Des Moines, Iowa for their work. They were made World Food Prize laureates in recognition of “their extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop biodiversity.” This prestigious award was founded over three decades ago by Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution and Nobel Peace Prize winner. 

“Winning the prize has put the issue of genetic diversity on the map. It often doesn’t get recognised. Plant breeding and coming up with new varieties is the sexy end of the research spectrum, yet genetic diversity, which underpins everything, is often overlooked. Yet you can’t breed without it, and it’s desperately threatened,” explains Dr Hawtin from his home in Dorset.  

“The loss of rhinoceroses, pandas, whales or butterflies get a lot of attention. Their demise is easy to visualise. People feel this loss in a visceral way. Whereas agricultural varieties, they are just there, you see them in seed catalogues. You see different varieties of say apples on the supermarket shelves. Crop biodiversity is taken for granted, but it shouldn’t be.”   

Climate change with its extreme heat, drought, flooding, and an evolving spectrum of new pests and diseases is testing crops in the UK, and throughout the world, to their limits. In the coming decades we will have to breed new varieties that are adaptable to radically different growing conditions than today and we will need an armoury of genetic resources to do it. 

Yet with the destruction of natural habitats and biodiversity loss, access to new varieties is diminishing over time. War and natural disasters are also taking their toll. So it’s a race against time. 

The Global Seed Vault has capacity to store 4.5 million samples, which is equivalent to 2.25 billion seeds, offering a continual backup source for growers in the decade ahead. It already provides genetic protection for over 6,000 varieties of crops and culturally important plants. But there’s more work to be done.   

“We’re not just talking about crop biodiversity as a source of genes for new varieties, with climate change we’re also talking about the need for more diverse cropping systems, where we will need a lot of different crops growing together and different varieties within those crops as well. We will need more genetic resources – but there’s been a lot of complacency, until now,” says Dr Hawtin, who is founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and now an executive board member.

He adds: “There’s a whole range of crops out there that aren’t being used, some of which we know will have huge potential in the future. We are pretty good at preserving the major crops including wheat, rice and maize, but some of the minor crops, which could be very important with climate change, are not well represented in the seed vault.”

A focus on wild relatives

It’s particularly important to preserve seeds from wild relatives, as well domesticated food crops. Wild relatives could have genes that allow them to fight pests emboldened by a warmer wetter climate for instance or withstand waterlogged soils. However, a huge percentage of the wild crop relatives that are important for our future food supply are still hugely under-represented in gene banks around the world. 

Hawtin believes crop wild relatives are one of the best weapons we have to climate-proof our global food system. For instance, a singular low-yielding variety of wheat clinging on to a poor, drought-laden bed of soil in Turkey’s Anatolian hills may look like a miserable, hopeless specimen trying to survive in hot, harsh conditions. Yet this one genetic variation could have resistance to a wide range of diseases that attack other high-yielding wheat varieties elsewhere in the world. 

This is exactly what happened in the past when one Turkish wheat sample became the parent to a number of modern varieties, improving productivity and saving farmers hundreds of millions of pounds a year around the globe. 

It’s not just more remote regions or those with harsher climates either; western Europe is home to wild relatives of carrot, which has over twenty species that are considered a high priority for saving in gene banks. 

“People are naturally inspired by biodiversity. Think about the varieties of fruit and vegetables that people buy and enjoy consuming on a daily basis. It’s not just vital for our diets, but it’s also crucial for the future of agriculture. Yet we’re losing it. People need to understand how important it is to preserve this,” points out Dr Hawtin, who’s also received an OBE for his services to agrobiodiversity conservation. 

“It also costs more to have diversity in our crops and our diets. I think people are going to have to be prepared to spend a higher percentage of their income on food if we want this. On average, many people are spending less than 10 per cent of their income on food [in the US + UK, the average is 11.2% and 11.8% respectively]. Many can afford to spend more. But that’s not the case with some parts of society or in other countries where households are spending 50 per cent of their income on food. We’ve really got to find ways of getting this diversity into people’s diets but keeping the price of food affordable.”

The importance of gene banks

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault may be the most iconic, but there are more than 1,700 gene banks around the world that contain a diverse collection of food crops. And even though the seed banks are relatively cheap to run, some are threatened by lack of funding, poor management, war and natural disasters.

Geoff Hawtin recalls how he collected crop seeds in Syria during the 1970s and deposited these samples in a gene bank located in Aleppo. It was then looted and destroyed in the civil war. “Luckily all the material had also been sent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for safekeeping. These seeds were then sent back from Norway to Morocco and Lebanon for regeneration and growing, as well as reconstituting their seed collections there.”

He now hopes that by becoming a World Food Prize laureate and raising the profile of crop biodiversity this will enable him to raise additional funding for seed banks around the world. This is what he has been doing since he helped set up the Global Crop Diversity Trust in 2004. It now has an endowment of US$317 million, but more is needed to secure the future of our genetic resources for the decades ahead. 

“Gene banks don’t show results within a few years, but over decades. This is why we need an endowment to provide an income that maintains the seed vaults over time. If we want to cover all of the key gene banks internationally, we reckon we need an endowment of around US$500 million. If we want to conserve all of the minor crops and other varieties that have yet to be collected we’re talking about US$850 million. So there is still a long way to go,” details Hawtin. “But what this buys you is the world’s best insurance policy for the future.”