The scientist who saved the Middle East’s priceless crops

Dr Geoff Hawtin helped create a vault in the North Pole to protect the world’s seeds

Agricultural scientist Dr Geoff Hawtin has spent his career saving seeds to provide food security for future generations. Photo: Dr Geoff Hawtin

When civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, agricultural scientist Dr Geoff Hawtin was left with little time to try to save the thousands of priceless seeds he had collected from across the Middle East.

Under gunfire, he and his team knew they needed to protect the 17,000 precious seed packets knowing they would be vital for the food security of future generations.

Driving 50km to the Syrian border over roads covered with landmines, he made five trips to take the collection to Damascus to safety.

It was then he realised the stakes for the Middle East as the seedbed of the world and made it his lifelong mission to protect the Mesopotamian heritage of the region.

It led to decades of work in helping to create a back-up seed bank in the North Pole to ensure people in hundreds of years time will still be able to grow crops to eat.

“You cannot put a value on these collections,” he told The National. “It could ultimately keep feeding people in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years time. They are extremely valuable.

“Although gene banks are meant to be safe, they are never totally safe, so it is important to back up these collections and have them in at least two locations.”

After studying at Cambridge University, he was given a grant by the Ford Foundation and the Canadian government to breed improved crops in the Middle East, based in Lebanon.

It was during this work that he realised how important it was to collect the seeds and keep them safe.

“I realised its value was not just for today but its future value,” he said.

“The Lebanon collection was very important; we had collected plants from across the Middle East.

“When the fighting broke out, we knew we had to move it. We didn’t think about the danger, the gunfire, we just wanted to get it out. We took it out pretty much under gunfire and into Syria just to keep the collection safe.

“The night before there was a lot of shelling things and it calmed down in the day, so we loaded thousands of the seeds into cars and drove to the border.

“We didn’t have a back up. If the Lebanon seeds had been stolen, the whole collection would have been lost.

“When we got to Syria, we started thinking: 'Hang on, what if this happens again, what do we do?', so Lebanon gave us an impetus to do that.”

Dr Hawtin, now 75, and his team moved his research to Aleppo and ensured copies were made of the seeds and saved elsewhere.

His programme then became the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda) in 1977, which he ran for a while. It was based in Aleppo until the war in 2012 before it had to relocate to Beirut.

“It is lucky we did make copies of the seeds,” he said.

“When fighting broke out in Syria in 2012 we had to get out and the gene bank was looted and everything was destroyed. Thankfully, we had copied the Lebanon collection and we could use the duplicates to replace all the lost seeds.”

It was the incident in Lebanon back in 1975 that led to him being instrumental in the creation of a safe storage place for all the world’s seeds in case another disaster struck – and where safer than the North Pole?

It led to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault being built 300 metres above sea level inside an ice mountain in the Arctic Circle.

The vault, nicknamed the Doomsday Vault, holds more than 1.4 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species and is the last line of defence against threats to global food security.

“We did two things after Lebanon. We set up a trust fund called the Global Crop Diversity Fund which supports gene banks,” he said.

“A lot of national programmes do collections but did not have the money to maintain them. They would get a nice collection, put it in a gene bank but would not have enough money to fund the electricity and would lose the whole lot.

“The idea was to provide a safety net and support some of the big collections around the world that were really at the heart of plant breeding globally.

“The other thing we did was to set up Svalbard as a safety net to allow all these international collections to put a back up collection in a very secure location.

“The most secure we could think of was to put it into the permafrost in the side of a mountain near the North Pole.”

The centre contains three large airtight vaults that are artificially cooled to minus 18ºC, which can hold four million seeds and is accessed through an ice tunnel.

“The idea is that this is one of the safest places you could be in the world so if anything did happen, most of that seed would be viable for decades, and to lengthen that time it is artificially cooled,” he said.

“Everything is white because of the frost, it is surreal.”

It took more than three decades from his initial dream of creating a global seed ark to it becoming a reality.

After the move to Syria, the seeds he had rescued became Icarda’s core collection and Dr Hawtin went on to lead international breeding programmes on the Middle East’s chickpeas, lentils and beans and was behind work which led to the development of chickpeas with cold tolerance for Mediterranean countries.

He went on to head the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome in 1991 to 2003, which was run by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the world’s largest publicly funded agricultural research organisation.

His work was pivotal in negotiating the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which was agreed upon in 2001, under which nations agreed to have their seeds stored in the same place.

It then paved the way for a world seed bank to be created.

In 2004, he and his colleague Dr Cary Fowler were asked to conduct a study to assess the feasibility of Svalbard and drew up its technical specifications.

Dr Hawtin, who has been a trustee at Kew Gardens and was awarded an OBE by the late Queen Elizabeth II, then created the Global Crop Diversity Trust, or Crop Trust, which now finances the vault alongside the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (NordGen).

Last month, Dr Hawtin and his colleague Dr Fowler, currently the US special envoy for global food security, were awarded the World Food Prize for their work in protecting seeds for the future at Svalbard.

“I was extremely happy, I thought that was nice but why me? There are 1,700 different gene banks around the world and everyone will have someone in charge of them,” he said.

“It is wonderful to have it but it is also very humbling.”

He has been devoting his career to protecting plants in the Middle East.

From his time in Lebanon, he travelled around Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria collecting rare plants to protect them for future generations.

“I went to Lebanon in 1974 to work on a programme that was breeding new varieties of crops for the Middle East and North Africa region – from Pakistan to Morocco and Turkey down to Ethiopia,” he said.

“There was very little research work at the time on the crops of that region so I was appointed to start a programme to breed improved varieties of broad beans, lentils and chick peas, which are important crops in the region, but there had been very little research done on them.

“The idea was to come up with varieties that were higher yielding, had more protein and resistant to pest and diseases, that would be useful for the farmers in the region.

“To start a breeding programme you need a lot of genetic diversity, like lots of different types of lentils so you can begin to make crosses between them and select out what is the important material for breeding.

“One of the first things I did when I went to the region was go out and collect materials which the farmers were growing.

“There were huge number of different varieties from the highlands of Afghanistan to the Euphrates valley. A lot of effort had gone into collecting it and it was material that could be valuable in the future beyond just its immediate use.”

Climate change

Dr Hawtin said the Middle East was important for food security in the future as important crops, such as wheat and barley, originated there up to 10,000 years ago and will be key to developing crops that can withstand climate change.

“The Middle East is an extremely important region for diversity of some of these crops because a lot of them originated there, like wheat and barley,” he said.

“Because they originated there it means there is still a lot of genetical diversity in that area that can be useful in breeding crops for the future, particularly drought-resistant crops.

“There is a lot of valuable genes there that can be used not just in that region but around the world for improving crops.

“Some of the wild wheats can be very small straggly plants growing in very dry hot environments and some of the genes that allow them to survive in those environments could be extremely useful for growing new varieties of wheat in the future that are able to withstand climate change and drought and high temperatures.

“The collections are hugely valuable because they have genes that may not be that useful today but could be extremely useful tomorrow. Climate change can bring different pests and diseases, so we are looking at resistance.

“There maybe a pest that exists somewhere in the world in a small way now and there maybe resistance to that pest in that area, but with climate change that could suddenly become of major importance.

“So, having that resistance that could exist in that one little area could be used to breed different varieties for the world in the future and it becomes very important.”

In 2004, Dr Hawtin set up the Global Crop Diversity Trust to conserve crop diversity and to make it available for the benefit of everyone.

He created an endowment fund, which presently stands at $300 million, to ensure that all nations are able to protect their seed banks.

Following his accolade, he is hoping it will help raise awareness of the importance of protecting crops and help increase the funding.

“Hopefully, it will help raise awareness of something that is so vitally important. Some people are not even aware that gene banks exist,” he said.

“The diversity of crops is so important for feeding the world in the future. If it brings more funding to ensure these materials are not lost, then great.”

Crop Trust

His next endeavour will be trying to increase funding to ensure the world can be fed 100 years from now.

“My proudest moment has been setting up the Crop Trust. It arose from gene banks that were experiencing financial difficulties and clearly needed some long-term funding support,” he said.

“It means we can give them funding if they are unable to pay for their electricity so all the crops are not destroyed.

“I’m hoping this award will bring attention to the issue, the endowment is at $300 million and hoping to get up to $500 million to get us to the next level of security.

“For the world to have complete security for all significant crops we need $800 million. If you think about it, $800m is not a huge amount of money.

“That would give you an insurance policy that you could feed the world 100 years from now. What better investment is there? It’s rewarding knowing that the work that we have done will help feed people 200 years from now.”