Dr. Geoff Hawtin OBE – The Inspiration for The Super-Seeders

Dr. Geoff Hawtin won the World Food Prize in 2024, together with his colleague Cary Fowler. Geoff had long been a champion of the conservation of crop diversity — a cornerstone of future food security. He helped forge the global network of gene banks, repositories of rare and diverse genes now at the heart of crop improvement. With “the father of the Treaty”, Pepe Esquinas and others, he was instrumental in negotiating the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture which emerged as a landmark response to decades of controversy, from biopiracy scandals and uneven access to genetic materials, to the disruptive impacts of intellectual property on biodiversity. It moved agriculture into an international legal framework of facilitated access to genetic material and benefit-sharing between 154 countries and the EU. The Treaty has expedited the transfer of millions of seeds from the gene banks to plant research and breeding centres around the world, contributing to food security, agricultural resilience, and innovation.

Guardians of Global Seeds: The Rise of International Gene Banks

Gene banks come in many forms—village-based, national, and international. In particular, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) gene banks stand out among the world’s most important repositories of crop diversity. Their development is tied closely to Geoff Hawtin, a British plant breeder whose work helped shape the modern system of international gene banks. Raised in North London, Geoff earned the nickname “Farmer Hawtin” thanks to summers spent working on farms, despite his urban roots. Encouraged by Cambridge professor Alice Evans, he pursued the research for a PhD in plant genetics at Makerere University in Uganda. There, during the political chaos of Idi Amin’s regime, he stayed on while many foreign staff fled, even stepping in to teach classes. In 1975, Geoff joined ICARDA—the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas—then based in Lebanon. ICARDA’s mission was to develop crops for dry, fragile regions facing drought, land degradation, and water scarcity. With research hubs at that time across Syria, Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan, ICARDA focused on crops such as wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, and forages, and it urgently needed a robust gene bank.

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When Geoff arrived, ICARDA’s seed collection was limited and lacked diversity. To change that, he organised expeditions to Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey—searching remote areas where ancient, genetically diverse landraces still survived. On one memorable trip to the Koh-i-Baba mountains in Afghanistan, Geoff and his colleagues, together with a translator, Mustafa, travelled in a battered Honda pickup to a remote highland village. Welcomed by the village elder, they collected seeds locally, but Hawtin wanted more diversity. He insisted on trekking further into the mountains. Concerned for their safety, the village elder sent a bodyguard—armed with an old revolver and just one bullet. Luckily, they returned safely—with rare and valuable seed samples in tow. At the time, ICARDA’s storage facilities were basic—just cold rooms at 5°C. Each new sample was meticulously documented with its origin, altitude, soil type, and growing conditions. The seeds were grown in field plots to study traits like height, maturity, flowering time, and pest resistance. Initially gathered for short-term breeding, these collections became an essential long-term resource requiring special conservation measures. But even gene banks aren’t immune to conflict. In the late 1970s, as war erupted in Lebanon, ICARDA’s seed bank—with 20,000 accessions of lentils, fava beans, and chickpeas—was at risk. During a period of heavy shelling, Geoff Hawtin, led a daring rescue operation. After several failed attempts, the seeds were safely evacuated across the Syrian border.

East Beirut, Lebanon. 1978. © Raymond Depardon / Magnum

These threats to vital seed collections led Geoff, along with Cary Fowler, to envision a global backup system. Years later, Fowler, aided by Hawtin and others, spearheaded the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle, with Norwegian government support. Its mission: to store duplicates of the world’s most important seed collections—insurance against catastrophe.

In 2011, that backup proved essential. When civil war engulfed Aleppo, the ICARDA genebank in Syria was lost. But because the seeds had been duplicated at Svalbard, the collections were restored in Morocco and Lebanon, ensuring continuity of critical research and breeding programs. Today, the 11 CGIAR gene banks collectively safeguard over 700,000 accessions—including cereals, legumes, root and tuber crops, bananas, forages, and tree species. Each centre specializes in key crops vital to global food systems. Together, they serve as the genetic foundation of future agriculture.

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