Latest news with #WorldSeedCongress
Agriland
3 days ago
- Science
- Agriland
What's the purpose of the ‘World Seed Vault' in Svalbard?
Located between the top of Norway and the North Pole on the Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard is a facilty known as the World Seed Vault. Built deep into a mountain, over 1.3 million varieties of seed are stored here at -18°C. Since construction began on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2006 and its launch in 2008, there has been an air of mystique surrounding its purpose. It has often been portrayed as a 'doomsday' vault, serving as a store for the world's key food crops in the event of an extinction of the key plant species necessary for human survival. At the World Seed Congress (WSC), which recently took place in Istanbul, Turkey, Agriland asked the key architect of the World Seed Vault, Dr. Cary Fowler how what he describes as a 'the safety, back-up store for global agriculture' came into being. A look inside the World Seed Vault. Source: ISF/Marc Grimwade Dr. Fowler said: 'I am pleased by the development at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. We now have samples of 1,345,000 different crop varieties. That's more than most people think exist in the world. 'These are housed as a safety backup for global agriculture – we've miraculously not lost any seeds in the transit process going up to Svalbard and we've been able to restore at least one major collection along the way that was in the process of being lost. 'So this is the biological foundation of agriculture and something I think that needs to be conserved if we plan on having agriculture around much longer.' While Dr Cary acknowledged the advantages of being able to conserve global agriculture, he noted another positive development of the vault. 'I think the point would be that we can come together as countries to do essential long-term things if we try and if we do that, it inspires other people, I think,' he said. Sowing the seeds for the vault In delivering the keynote address at the WSC, Dr. Fowler – who was the winner of the 2024 World Food Prize – said: 'When I was head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, at a certain point it just struck me: 'This is not good enough because the safety of our most-valuable natural resource on earth was only as safe as a building was safe and they're subject to all kinds of issues'. 'So I thought 'OK, let's have a safety back-up, a failsafe place, an insurance policy, to keep this' and we went far north to try to do that.' Svalbard is about as far north as commercial flights go, and 'has the advantage of being remote but also very cold so it can save seed for a long time'. 'We envisaged it would be a seed vault that would be built in the middle of the mountain where it's very cold,' Fowler explained. The entrance to the World Seed Vault. Source: ISF/Marc Grimwade While the region is naturally cold, the seed samples are stored in freezers at -18°C. 'If the refrigeration fails, the temperature might slowly rise to -4 or -5°C but would still remain frozen and that would give us many months to get the repair man out to fix the refrigeration,' Dr Fowler said. 'Each sample contains 400-500 seeds and there are more than 1.3 million different seed populations or what normal people would call 'varieties'. 'This includes more than 150,000 samples of rice, more than 150,000 samples of wheat. This is the largest collection of biodiversity anywhere in the world.' The American agriculturalist believes that the answers to many challenges facing global crop production 'are in the seed banks'. A doomsday vault? Dr. Fowler was asked if the seed vault is a 'doomsday vault', as it has been portrayed in the media. He said: 'We did not think anyone in the world would be interested in what we were doing. Frankly, crop diversity, gene banks – it was never in the media – they would say it's a boring subject. 'I have to acknowledge if something gigantic potentially happened, it would be in that case 'a doomsday vault', but we never thought of it that way. What we wanted to do was protect the more mundane extinction that takes place. 'We wanted to end that kind of drip, drip, drip extinction,' he clarified. He explained that the seed vault 'operates like a safety deposit box at the bank'. 'Depositors send a copy of their seeds and the seed vault protects those seeds free of charge, and if anything happens to the original copy, the sample in the seed bank can be returned to the depositor. Nobody else has access to them.' In his presentation at the WSC, he noted that some of his ''favourite boxes' in the seed vault came from a seed bank located outside Aleppo in Syria. He said: 'The reason they're my favourite is because we got those boxes out in an emergency situation just before all hell broke loose in Aleppo during the civil war there. 'So those boxes came out overland on a truck for two weeks before they could fly to the centre here.' The location of the World Seed Vault. Source: ISF/Marc Grimwade He explained that the seed samples contained in these boxes came from the Consortium of International Agricultural Research centre (CGIAR) in Aleppo which was 'a major holder of materials – particularly wheat, barley and several other important crops' of which were drought tolerant and that the samples are 'of global importance'. 'It would have been a true global humanitarian disaster had that collection been lost,' the agriculturalist said. Why not just keep the best seed? Dr. Fowler said he is often asked why not only keep 'the best seed varieties' in the vault. He explained: 'The problem is, we don't know which ones are the best and the best changes all the time so a variety or trait that might be useful or considered 'the best' today might be an insects' lunch tomorrow. Things change in the world. 'There's a great American conservationist named Aldo Leopold and he said: 'The first rule of successful tinkering is to save all the pieces', and I think we're still tinkering, we're still playing with agriculture in a way.' He emphasised the importance of saving 'all the pieces' in the form of seed varieties 'particularly when it's so easy and cheap to do so and so expensive to lose them'. Dr. Fowler pointed to examples in history where seed samples of poor-yielding varieties of crops such as wheat were preserved in countres that later became important in breeding programmes in other regions in the world. Dr. Cary Fowler (fourth from left) responding to a question from Agriland in a press briefing at the World Seed Congress 'One of my heroes, Jack Harlan, had collected what he described as 'a hopelessly useless variety of wheat' in this county [Turkey] back in 1948.' Dr. Fowler explained that, in 1963, plant breeders were examining how to make US wheat resistant to stripe rust and discovered that this supposedly 'useless' Turkish wheat variety was immune to four kinds of stripe rust and forty-seven other wheat diseases. The Turkish wheat was then crossbred with US varieties of wheat. Dr. Fowler asked: 'What did it cost to conserve that wheat? Virtually nothing. But had we not done that, if we had forfeited that benefit – and that's the story of crop diversity.'
Agriland
4 days ago
- General
- Agriland
World could ‘fall far short' of meeting food needs by 2050
Former US special envoy for global food security and leading advocate for global seed conservation and crop diversity, Dr. Cary Fowler has expressed concerns about how global food systems are positioned to feed the world population going forward. At the World Seed Congress (WSC) organised by the International Federation (ISF), which recently took place in Istanbul, Turkey, Agriland asked Dr. Fowler how he believes the world is currently positioned to feed its growing population. Dr. Fowler won the 2024 World Food Prize and was also a key architect in the development of the World Seed Vault in Svalbard. In his keynote address to the WSC, he said: 'Back in October [2024], my office at the US Department of State brought together a small group of Nobel laureates and World Food Prize laureates. 'We drafted a statement saying that we were going to fall far short of meeting food need and food demand by 2050 and we really need to now make a long-term commitment to make transformative, bold moonshot research and development in order to have the kind of transformative developments in food production that will be necessary to feed people by 2050. 'So yes, I'm worried about how we're positioned to feed the world at this point,' he told Agriland. Dr. Cary Fowler delivering the keynote address at the World Seed Congress Dr. Fowler said: 'Today, there at least 750 million people on earth who are food insecure. We define that as not having access to sufficient food for basic human needs. 'There are three billion people on earth than can not afford an adequate diet and, I think most tragically, there are 60 million children under the age of five who are physically and cognitively stunted – and are so because of inadequate food intake and more importantly, inadequate nutrition. 'I urge you to think about what our world is going to look like and what governments in countries are going to look like if we have a third of the children in many countries – in Africa for instance – who are growing up physically and cognitively stunted. That's not a world we want to live in in the future. 'We don't just have a problem with food insecurity, we have a problem with nutrition insecurity and we aren't really thinking about those in the same way,' Dr. Fowler added. The American agriculturalist listed six headwinds he believes are facing food security in the future: Climate; Soil; Water; Conflict; Trade; Research and development. Dr. Fowler also noted that said that April was the second-hottest April ever recorded on earth. However, he added: 'More interestingly, it was the 555th consecutive month in which the global average temperature for the month exceeded the 20th century average. '555 consecutive months of what some people would call 'above average' temperatures.' He highlighted that there will also be a negative hit to food productivity in the future because of climate. Soil and water On soil, Dr. Fowler noted that the African Union has said as much as 50% of its current cropland may be unusable by the year 2050, while more than 75% of their land is already degraded'. He referred to a recent study showing that 14-17% of existing global cropland is affected by toxic metal pollution. 'That means 900 million to 1.4 billion people are living in regions of what they call heightened public health and ecological risk,' Dr. Fowler explained. On water, the agriculturalist said that 'agriculture globally takes about 70% of freshwater supplies', but also noted that this percentage is higher in his home country of the US. '21 of 37 major aquafers in the world are in a position of being depleted faster than they are replenishing,' Commenting on the ties between conflict and food security, he said: 'Food insecurity is a cause of conflict. It has been a cause of conflict for thousands of years. 'But on the other hand, conflict is a driver of food insecurity and if you look at where the hungry people are in the world today, 60% of them are living in countries that are experiencing conflict. 'So without solving the problem of food insecurity, we're not going to solve the problem of conflict in our world.' Future of agriculture On research and development, he highlighted that budgets for agricultural research and development – as well as basic scientific research – have been in decline for decades. Dr. Fowler said: 'It's really interesting to me because, if you look at the return on investment, it's 10-1, sometimes 30-1, and yet we've starved those budgets.' The agriculturalist also quoted Norman Borlaug – who won the Nobel prize in 1970 – who famously said during his laureate lecture: 'The Green Revolution has bought us 30 years of time'. The Green Revolution refers to the development of high-yielding plant varieties in the 1940s to the 1960s. It is widely acknowledged that these developments – especially in wheat and rice crops – increased food supplies and staved off widespread starvation in developing countries. Dr. Fowler said: 'That was in 1970. We've passed the 30-year mark. What we haven't done is to commit to any type of long-term initiative similar to Norman Borlaug's. 'So, if we want to meet food need by 2050, we can't wait until 2049, we need to be making these investments now.' In summarising the main points of his keynote presentation, Dr. Fowler said: 'Agriculture faces a historic culmination of challenges. 'I've never seen anything like the culmination of challenges that agriculture faces now. Any one of those challenges would be really serious but the culmination of them is something that we collectively are not taking seriously enough.' The World Seed Congress took place from Monday, May 19, to Wednesday, May 21 in Istanbul, Turkey. The event was organised by the International Seed Federation (ISF) and saw over 1,500 delegates from 70 countries attend. Agriland attended the event in association with a group of 11 journalists from nine countries, facilitated by the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists.
Agriland
22-05-2025
- General
- Agriland
New international course launched for agri-journalists
The College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US has announced a new international education partnership targeted towards agricultural journalists. The new venture is a partnership between the college's Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications (ALEC) programme and the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ), of which the All-Ireland Guild of Agricultural Journalists is a member. The agreement formalises plans to launch a certificate in Global Agricultural Communications, which has been described by IFAJ as 'a milestone initiative' of the proposed James F. Evans Global Center for Food and Agricultural Communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The partnership was unveiled recently at a ceremonial signing between ACES dean Germán Bollero and IFAJ vice-president Adalberto Rossi. The certificate – which will be delivered online and available broadly – is being developed by the ALEC faculty and informed by research conducted with IFAJ members. It is being designed with the aim of being globally accessible, career-relevant, and aligned with the needs of agricultural communicators working across languages, geographies, and media platforms. This marks the first time that the IFAJ has committed to an academic collaboration of this scale. The federation voted unanimously to support the initiative, citing the urgent need to prepare communicators to lead in a rapidly evolving, interconnected food system. IFAJ vice-president Adalberto Rossi said: 'This certificate represents an exciting step forward for the global agricultural journalism community. 'By equipping professionals with critical thinking, multimedia skills, and a global perspective, we can raise the bar for agricultural communications worldwide.' The certificate will be among the first offerings of the Evans Center, a newly announced hub within ACES that aims to advance education, research, and leadership in food and agricultural communications. Speaking at the International Seed Federation's (ISF's) World Seed Congress in Istanbul, Turkey on a panel discussion titled 'Battling misinformation and fake news about seeds' on Wednesday, May 21, the IFAJ secretary general Adrian Bell said: 'There's nothing new about fake news, it's been happening for years if not centuries. IFAJ secretary general Adrian Bell speaking at the World Seed Congress in Istanbul this week. Source: ISF 'Part of what we think is the need to equip journalists and communicators across the agri-food system with the tools they need to tackle this properly and just this month, we've seen a culmination of a long-term project within IFAJ to deliver a new certificate of education in agri-journalism,' Bell announced.
