Note: This transcript is auto generated and lightly edited.
CARY: If you're looking at a growing world population, which already has seven or 800 million people that are food insecure, and a decrease in production of our major staple crops, then you're really looking at a disaster. And that's not just a food and humanitarian disaster, by the way, that's a national security disaster, not just for the United States, but for every country in the world.
MONICA: Welcome to Policy for the Planet, a podcast exploring the global response to the climate crisis. We'll unravel the complex tradeoffs of different policy choices to steer us toward sustainable solutions and public well-being.
I'm Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Welcome to the conversation.
Around 900 million people faced famine or severe food insecurity globally in 2023. More than 3.1 billion people can't afford a healthy diet. The world's population will triple by 2050, and they will face more extreme weather, conflict-eroded soils, and a hotter climate.
Joining us today is Cary Fowler, founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and former special envoy for food security at the US State Department.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is where millions of seeds are stored in a frozen mountain in Norway. He lobbied for its creation with the Norwegian government and helped to open the vault in 2008.
He served as executive director for Crop Trust from 2005 to 2012, and won the World Food Prize alongside Geoffery Hawtin in 2024 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."
Well, hello, Cary. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm really excited for this episode because it just covers so many interesting things and so many key areas relating to food security. So I'm just going to jump right in. Food security is obviously a major theme associated with climate change. And we know that climate change has been affecting the production and the harvesting cycles of various crops. But what I really want to sort of get from you is what is, if we had to name a main problem, what is the main problem when it comes to food security and climate change? Is it droughts and extreme weather events that we usually hear about? Or is it more things like, you know, soil health, the ability to have soil regeneration, things of that sort, which can lead to crop failure and are obviously associated with climate change as well.
CARY: Is all of the above a possible answer for that question? I think we're facing all of those issues. And one of the main problems, Monica, is that people don't connect all those dots. So it's pretty easy to look at the projections for what climate, i.e. heat, is going to do to crops. But typically, those projections don't count what's going to happen with water problems or soil.
MONICA: Yes, of course.
CARY: Degradation or soil loss or conflict or trade issues. So when we look at the projections going out, let's say to 2050 for major food crops, you'll see that those projections are telling us that the productivity of our major staple food crops, most of the places in the world and in aggregate is going to go down. And that's contrasted with the fact that we need to be increasing food production pretty dramatically, particularly in areas that are already food insecure. And I would say the other thing which you might want to explore is that we don't start from a very good baseline. So we already start with 700, 800 million people who are food insecure. And in that context, if you're looking at a growing world population, which already has seven or 800 million people that are food insecure, and a decrease in production of our major staple crops, then you're really looking at a disaster. And that's not just a food and humanitarian disaster, by the way, that's a national security disaster, not just for the United States, but for every country in the world. It's a conflict problem.
MONICA: Exactly. I mean, it's a disaster in the making with a lot of different dimensions, geopolitical dimensions, political dimensions, social dimensions, health dimensions, you name it and it's there. And in that context, I mean, not in that context as such, but I did want to talk about the global seed vault because of course you are paramount in the effort of setting up the global seed vault. And I think some people know about it, but a lot of people don't. So if you can talk a little bit about the global seed vault, what it is, what it does, why it was set up, what it's doing now, all of the issues around the global seed vault, biodiversity, everything that you have worked on and that has led to this incredible initiative.
CARY: Sure. Well, I think whether it's out of stubbornness or naivete, I've always gravitated towards trying to identify and work on what I think of as really fundamental problems. What are the prerequisites for having the kind of world or society we want to live in? The seed vault, the origins of that, or let's say the background.
First is that most countries have seed banks where they store diversity of different crops and they don't do that just for the fun of it and for the conservation value if you will. They do it to supply their plant breeders, their crop breeders, so that the folks that are working on the next variety of wheat or rice or corn or whatever have the raw materials, the genetic diversity to fashion that next variety that might be higher yielding or climate resistant or resistant to pests and diseases. The problem with those seed banks is that they're located in the real world in buildings. Typically you collect these seeds, these seed samples, and you freeze them for the long term.
But if they're in a building they're subjected obviously to conflict that's occurred in a couple of countries and affected seed banks, also floods and tornadoes and hurricanes and budget cuts and stupid human errors and equipment failures and everything that you can imagine a building could be affected by, it affects seed banks. And every time it does that, we have an extinction event. So we may lose a unique sample of rice or wheat.
And in that unique sample of rice or wheat, you might have unique genes for traits. It might be the trait that you need to give rice or some other crop the resistance that it's just got to have in the future to a pest or disease. So in this modern time, gosh, can we afford to lose these future options for agriculture when it's so simple to freeze seeds? mean, can't we get ourselves together to do that?
So with that in mind, through an organization called the CGIAR, I approached the Norwegian government. This was back in 2003 and said, would you consider looking into the feasibility of establishing an international seed bank in Svalbard? Now, if you have a globe handy and you go to the northernmost part of mainland Norway and then you just go a bit north of there out in the across the ocean towards the North Pole you'll see Svalbard. It's the farthest north you can fly on a regularly scheduled plane.
And in 2000, I mean, was working, it took about four years to put it all together. And I was working with the architects and others. The facility is built inside of a mountain in Svalbard, that's 78 degrees north. Inside the mountain, because it's really cold there and the temperature is quite stable. And if you want to conserve seed for the long term, you freeze them.
It's also very safe inside a mountain of about 130 meters inside a rock mountain. So there's not a lot of bad things that can happen there. And we opened up in 2008 and the facility functions a little bit like a safety deposit box in the bank where Norway owns the mountain, if you will. But you own your deposit of seeds.
MONICA: Mm-hmm.
CARY: And so we opened ourselves up for national and institutional deposits of seeds. In the very beginning, I think the first year, we had about 300,000 different samples.
So today we have 1,345,000 samples. So we've gone somewhat above. And that means like 150,000 different kinds of rice and even more different kinds of wheat. We've not lost a single sample. This is extraordinary because there've been years when the airlines have lost my luggage more than once, but we haven't lost a single box of seeds coming up there. And it's a big insurance policy for global agriculture. Of course, the thing about insurance policies is you never want to collect them, insurance policy. And so I was kind of thinking for a while that if we never collected on the insurance policy, my obituary would read that I was the brains behind some gigantic international folly. But, you know, unfortunately, unfortunately, no, we have had to, and I would prefer to be known for the folly, but no, we had to use it and shortly after Arab Spring started, I had a friend who was the director of an international institution outside of Aleppo, Syria. And I called him up to say, let's get a duplicate copy of your seeds up there. And he first demurred and said, well, I don't think this trouble in the region is ever going to come to Syria because the regime has everything so locked down.
MONICA: My god, famous last words.
CARY: Exactly. I said, well, yeah, well, you know, just in case. And he kind of laughed and he said, that's what the seed vault is about, isn't it? It's about just in case. And I said, yeah. So we got the seeds up there. And of course, all hell broke loose around Aleppo, Syria. The scientists had to flee, reestablish their institute outside of Syria. And we were able to repatriate those seeds. And that's kept that breeding program alive. that their breeding program was really the chief source of high yielding varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas for that region. By the way, all those crops originated in that region. So this was a collection of essentially indigenous diversity from that region. So I think that kind of proved the concept and the facility goes on as it should.
MONICA: Well, it is such an inspiring image and the way you just said it now, know, the seeds getting along, there you go, the seeds do get along. So with the Global Seed Vault and your own work on plant biodiversity, how did all of this combine in your work at the State Department?
CARY: We hope so. So far, so good.
My work at the State Department focused on a couple of things in particular. One was we put up an initiative we call VACS, an acronym for the vision for adapted crops and soils. That was really to take advantage of what I thought was both a huge problem and a huge opportunity. The problem was soil degradation around the world, particularly in Africa.
The problem was bad nutrition, issues with undernourishment, issues with childhood stunting, for example, and the opportunity that investment in indigenous African crops could provide to increase productivity of agriculture in Africa and increase nutrition in Africa. That was one of the two big initiatives that my office of global food security was involved in.
We saw it as essentially a movement where we were coming forth with an idea. The idea was that we should invest in some of these under-invested crops that maybe were under-invested not because of any inherent inferiority, but because of the history of colonialism and such that diverted attention away to and resources towards major crops from our region, not major crops that were indigenous in Africa. So I think that there's a lot of potential there. think the cost benefit ratio for investment, whether it's a development program or an investment from the private sector is just going to be tremendous.
And it's very much what the African countries themselves have said that they need both to strengthen food security and actually to strengthen their own indigenous cultures, which they're proud of.
MONICA: Yeah. Can I, may I come back to something that you said in the beginning, because it's been popping up in my mind. You mentioned how people have a lot of difficulty connecting the dots when it comes to food security and climate change, because there are so many things that sort of map one into the other. And you spoke specifically of, you know, issues such as even trade protectionism potentially getting in the way of guaranteeing food security or trying to minimize the risks to food security that we face going forward.
In the current environment, given the things that we're facing coming out from various regions of the world, how would you sort of make the case connecting the dots of the connections between climate change and food security in a way that everyone can understand once they listen to this episode?
CARY: I guess I would try a couple of different things. One would be, I would say that we have now experienced 553 consecutive months in which the global average temperature exceeded the 20th century average for that month. So in other words, this past February was warmer than the 20th century average for February's. And we've had 553 consecutive months that way. Now that's either a lot of coincidence or it's a trend.
MONICA: And it doesn't sound like a coincidence.
CARY: And if you know it doesn't sound like coincidence and if you look at Africa in particular, where we're headed towards is a place where in the future the best and coolest growing seasons will be hotter and worse than the past growing seasons. And from the soil perspective, the African Union itself says that 75-80% of the soils in Africa are degraded and half of the soils may be unusable by 2050. Now, if you just take those two facts and if you add in, let's say, half of the world's population being in a severe water shortage stressed area by 2050, and 21 of 37 major aquifers in the world being depleted, not replenished fast enough to keep even.
If you connect all those dots, what you're doing is really undermining the foundations of agriculture. And that's something that's going to affect us in the United States. In fact, everybody in the world because as one, think you and secretary general put it, if you don't feed people, you feed conflict.
And I look at, I look particularly at something that just bothers me tremendously in my heart and that is the childhood stunting rate around the world have 60 million children under the age of five who are physically and cognitively stunted because of nutritional issues. If you put yourself in the position of being a parent of such a child, what are you willing to do?
MONICA: Anything.
CARY: Exactly, are you willing to migrate? Are you willing to pick up arms? What are you willing to do? Historically, what food insecurity has meant has meant that it's been correlated with conflict.
And that goes back to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt and ancient China. So this is not the world we want to live in. We have a lot of discussion these days about critical minerals and other raw materials that wealthy industrialized countries want. Guess where those come from? Those come from places, by and large, that have a lot of food insecurity. So you could think in very Machiavellian personal terms of what's it going to take for us to have a viable contract with a government in Africa or somewhere else to supply us with the critical minerals we need.
Well, it's going to take a stable government, which you're not going to have with food insecurity. So I think the tragedy is both human and it's in terms of governments and economies. And I think, too, back to this childhood stunting problem, that it's not just a family problem, it really is a national problem. Imagine if in the United States, as in some Central American countries and many African countries, one third of our children under five were physically and cognitively stunted. Now, what would the prospects be for our future economy in the United States?
MONICA: They'd be terrible.
CARY: They'd be terrible and they're likewise terrible in countries that are even starting from a lower position than we are in terms of their economy. So once again, I think it's a there are many reasons to try to help these countries simply because it's the right thing to do. But it's also in our interest to do it. And by the way, I think we know how to do it. I think, in fact, for the United States, this is our comparative advantage. My gosh, if we're not among the best countries in the world in terms of knowing how to produce food, I don't know who is, we have this advantage. And it's something that we can share with the rest of the world to our own benefit.
MONICA: So, I'm going to...Let me switch to something that is very much related to all of the issues you've just spoken about, and it impacts them directly, which is research and funding for research. And here I'm thinking specifically of research that covers issues such as how to resolve or how to alleviate soil degradation in different parts of the world, things that you have already mentioned.
So, your genetic research, looking at seed resistance under various scenarios, a host of things. How do you see the prospect for funding for this kind of research to continue in the areas of the world where this kind of research is naturally more prominent? And here I'm thinking, you know, it's more prominent in Europe, it's more prominent in the United States, it's more prominent in some global South countries as well.
Although as you've pointed out, many of them have severe capacity issues. So it's not something as widespread as we'd like to see. But how do you look at this question of funding and research to help ameliorate these future problems that we see coming, again, in a world where things seem to be fragmenting?
CARY: That question pushes my buttons because it's the issue that I'm most concerned with right now. You ask what are the prospects for research? I have to say not good. On an inflation adjusted basis, we in the United States are spending as much publicly on agricultural research as we did 50 years ago, no more. And we face much more extreme challenges now than we did then.
And in fact, 50 years ago, we were way out in front of every other country in the world in terms of our agricultural technology and our public support of it. I think we were about a quarter of the global expenditures, public expenditures for ag research were the United States. China 50 years ago was less than 1%. Now China is in first place 50% ahead of us in that small amount of time. So if you look at the kind of difficulty, the challenge that we writ large, the globe, the world is going to face in meeting food demand and food need, which is somewhat different, by 2050, we're going to have to engage in some really dramatic transformational research in food and agriculture, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Green Revolution.
When Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in his laureates address, he said, well, this buys us about 30 years of time. Well, that was 55 years ago. And we haven't had any breakthroughs like that. that's why we catalyzed at the US State Department while I was there, an effort to bring together Nobel laureates and World Food Prize laureates to issue a statement, which we did, on the need to double down and make investments in really bold, transformational, what we call moonshot research, channeling John Kennedy's moonshot. I'm going to send a man to the moon in 10 years and bring them back safely.
And we opened that up for signatures, endorsements by the Nobel and World Food Prize laureates. To date, we have 26 World Food Prize laureates. have 128 Nobel laureates that have endorsed this call to action. I think that the challenge there, Monica, is that people have an odd view of research itself. They think it's some...nerdy character in a white lab coat walking around, just spending a lot of money to satisfy his or her own curiosity. When in fact, agricultural research is one of the few things I would argue that enjoys a terrific cost benefit ratio for government expenditure. So you spend $1 on agricultural research. Wow. Depending on the type you either get $10 back or even $30 back. There are not many things that government can do that turns a profit like that.
MONICA: No. So in other words, is incredibly efficient. Agricultural research is incredibly efficient at delivering these kinds of results, as you're saying.
CARY: Absolutely. And the benefit lasts for about 50 years of agricultural research. It's not a one-off like, well, this is great for this year. What's next year? No, it lasts for a long time. So it has great societal benefits, and it benefits everyone. We even, in the United States, I'll just say, we even essentially make money off of the ag research that's devoted to helping farmers in the developing world.
Because it doesn't just stay in the developing world. Those technologies are also useful on the farm here. Can you imagine?
MONICA: It comes back. Yeah, these I think are the kinds of things that, you know, be useful for people to really get a sense of and an understanding of because what we're really talking about here is that, you know, it's agricultural research. It goes into the heart of food security and everything else. And it has massive benefits all around, including a lot of benefits for the economy because of course you're benefiting the agricultural sector, you're benefiting farmers.
That moves the economy in so many ways and it can only be helpful, you know, in the...in the short term, the medium term and the long term, both for the United States and the rest of the world. So with that in mind, are countries going to do what it takes, you think, to at least keep the research agenda moving somewhat, even if right now things don't seem to be going anywhere?
CARY: You know, I wish I could say yes. I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic on this front. I do think that, as I said, that science and agricultural research is fundamentally misunderstood in this country and many others. And I think we face another issue, particularly, well, maybe not particularly in the United States, but certainly it affects us. And that is we just don't think very long term. And who was it that said that today's problems have been caused by yesterday's solutions? We're not thinking very far ahead.
And if we're going to have the kind of transformational improvements in food production that we absolutely have got to have for our own good and everybody else's by 2050, we can't start in 2049. These things take a bit of time. And I do think there's some remarkable technologies out there that can be developed that are pro-poor, that are scale neutral, that can be scaled up quickly that will help everyone. Things like nitrogen fixing cereal grains so that farmers basically produce and the plants produce their own fertilizer. This would be a great thing for Africa. Or better photosynthesis. There are two different kinds of photosynthesis. Some of our major crops have the least, the less efficient one. Maybe those kinds of things. I don't know. I don't know what the best bets will be.
We need a process, frankly, from a scientific organization, maybe it's the National Academy of Sciences or some other, to evaluate the issues and to weigh in on what the best bets for research would be. And then we need to mobilize the funding. By the way, we've talked about cooperation and what's good for the world. I don't think any one country can do this alone. I don't think it's our responsibility to do it alone in the United States, nor do I think it would be wise to try to do it alone.
MONICA: So Cary, thank you so much for coming on the show. And it was a pleasure to talk to you. And it was a pleasure to learn from you.
CARY: Well, thank you. It's pleasure to talk with you too. I enjoyed the discussion. Thanks.
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