28 October 2024
This month, we celebrate the life of Cary Fowler, a key figure in the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and co-recipient of the World Food Prize in 2024 for his dedication to conserving crop diversity in the face of climate change and other threats.
Cary Fowler is one of the world’s foremost experts on crop diversity and has played key roles in the institutions tasked with securing the future of food amid the threats of climate change, war, and natural disasters.
For 50 years, the Tennessee-born agriculturalist has raised public awareness about the rapid disappearance of crop diversity in farmers’ fields. He has urged governments to safeguard the world’s food systems by conserving one of the Earth’s most valuable natural resources – seeds.
“Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture – silent, rapid, inexorable – is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction – to the doorstep of hunger on a scale that we refuse to imagine,” Fowler wrote in his 1990 book Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, co-authored with Pat Mooney.
In the decades that followed this grim warning, Fowler dedicated his career to ensuring the operational and financial viability of genebanks. These repositories of biological diversity help plant breeders and scientists develop new crop varieties capable of adapting to harsh climatic conditions, pests and diseases.
In 2024, Fowler was named a World Food Prize laureate alongside Geoffery Hawtin for “extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop biodiversity and mobilizing this critical resource to defend against threats to global food security.”
Both men helped define the first decade of the Crop Trust’s development. Fowler served in the position of Executive Director from 2005 to 2012. Under his leadership, the Crop Trust raised over USD 200 million for the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund and established crucial partnerships with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as well as CGIAR, a global agricultural research partnership.
Cary Fowler at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Protecting the Raw Material for Plant Breeding
Fowler was instrumental in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a last-resort backup facility housed in an ice-capped mountain on a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
Fifteen years after its opening, the Global Seed Vault stores more than 1.3 million seed samples from more than 6,000 species of crops, their wild relatives and other culturally important plants. This makes the Vault the world’s largest collection of crop diversity.
Fowler chaired the Norwegian government’s committee that assessed the facility’s feasibility, helped break political deadlocks and secured support from national authorities and international bodies. He also served nine years as chair of the Seed Vault’s International Advisory Council.
“We didn’t set out to protect against doomsday,” Fowler said in a May 2024 television interview. “We weren’t thinking about an asteroid hitting Earth or anything like that. But we know that collections of seeds, collections of diversity and seedbanks around the world are vulnerable to natural catastrophes, war, civil strife, mechanical failures. And that’s the raw material for plant breeding.”
Early Years
Morgan Carrington “Cary” Fowler Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1949. His father was a General Sessions Court judge, and his mother was a dietician.
He received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honors from Simon Fraser University in Canada in 1971, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Uppsala University in Sweden in 1994.
While working as a researcher, Dr. Fowler found his calling in life after reading about the loss of crop diversity in the work of U.S. botanist Jack Harlan. This alarming discovery prompted the young university graduate to promote international action on the issue at the FAO, helping farmers secure rights to their seeds.
It was also at the FAO that Fowler and his colleague Pat Mooney were the first to propose an international treaty on crop diversity and floated the idea of an international genebank in 1979.
Plan of Action
Dr. Fowler oversaw the United Nations’ first global assessment of the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, published in 1997. He was also responsible for drafting and negotiating the first Global Plan of Action on the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, formally adopted by 150 countries in 1996.
Twice serving as special assistant to the secretary general of the World Food Summit, Fowler also represented the CGIAR in the multi-year negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which entered into force on 29 June 2004. Also known as the International Plant Treaty, over 6.5 million plant accessions have been transferred to users all over the world through the Multilateral System of Access and Benefit Sharing that it established in 2007.
Crop Trust Tenure
During his time at the Crop Trust, Dr. Fowler highlighted the need to support crop diversity conservation and availability through the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund. He also led fundraising for global initiatives, such as the Crop Wild Relatives project, followed by the Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development (BOLD) project.
“The endowment is absolutely the best structure for ensuring the conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity,” Fowler says. “It provides a guarantee of funding. It provides a tool for ensuring efficiency and rationality. And it’s cheaper and more reliable than scrambling around annually to find funds to keep the electricity on. Completing the endowment remains one of my dreams.”
At the Crop Trust, Fowler and his colleagues coordinated a massive rescue project for threatened diversity in genebanks around the world. More than 80,000 crop samples in over 90 countries were rescued and regenerated through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with copies going to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
He also helped coordinate and finance the duplication of the CGIAR collections in Svalbard and made the first “in perpetuity” conservation grants to genebanks. These five-year rolling grants can theoretically go on forever, assuming good performance by the genebank.
“It was a unique approach that gave funding assurance to the genebanks while giving the Crop Trust leverage to ensure that the genebanks would be operated properly,” Fowler says.
Fowler also oversaw the establishment of the Crop Trust’s Fund Disbursement Strategy, which outlines a vision for an effective and efficient global genebank system and guides decisions for Crop Trust support. This strategy was finalized through consultations with the Governing Body of the International Plant Treaty.
After the Crop Trust
Dr. Fowler has served as a board member of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), chair of the Livestock Conservancy and member of the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development, which advises USAID on issues relevant to agriculture and food security.
In 2022, he was appointed Special Envoy for Global Food Security in the U.S. Department of State. In this role, he promotes traditional local crops, especially in Africa, through the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) initiative to enhance nutrition and agricultural resilience under climate change.
“We are finally seeing attention being paid to crops other than the major staples,” he says. “Recognizing that the world needs not just calories but nutritional security means that we must take care to collect, conserve and use the diversity of crops that have received comparatively less attention historically. This is exciting.”
Timeline:
- 1949: Born in Memphis, Tennessee
- 1971: Awarded Bachelor of Arts with first-class honors from Simon Fraser University, Canada
- 1978‒1990: Program director of the National Sharecroppers Fund in North Carolina
- 1990: Associate professor at the Norwegian College of Agriculture
- 1993‒1996: Manages the FAO International Conference and Program for Plant Genetic Resources
- 1994: Awarded Ph.D. in sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden
- 2003: Asks the Norwegian government to consider establishing a global seed vault in Svalbard
- 2005‒2012: Executive Secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust
- 2008: Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens
- 2012: Elected member of Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences
- 2015: Appointed to Board for International Food and Agricultural Development at USAID
- 2022‒present: Special envoy for global food security in U.S. Department of State
- 2024: Laureate of the World Food Prize, alongside Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin
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