Clemson University will host a World Food Prize Laureate for what is believed to be the first time.
Geoffrey Hawtin, a world-renowned expert on crop diversity and co-recipient of the 2024 World Food Prize, will be a guest speaker April 14 at 11 a.m. at the Watt Family Innovation Center auditorium.
“I’ve worked with him for a really long time,” said Stephen Kresovich, Clemson’s Robert and Lois Coker Trustees Endowed Chair of Genetics. “He’s very engaging. It would be great for students, as well as staff and faculty, to attend because he’s got an interesting background. He’s going to talk about his history and he’s going to talk about the implications of linking conservation and agriculture.”
Hawtin received the World Food Prize, which Kresovich likened to a Nobel Prize, for his extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop biodiversity and mobilizing this incredible resource to defend against threats to global food security.
Through his work with Crop Trust, an international organization dedicated to conserving and making crop diversity available for use globally, forever and for the benefit of everyone, Hawtin was a key figure in helping to establish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The seed vault is located on Norway’s Spitsbergen island. It was built to serve as the world’s long-term secure backup repository for crop diversity.
In its 18 years of operation, the vault is now home to 1.35 million accessions of crops, their wild relatives and other culturally important plants from more than 6,000 species from nearly every country in the world. The collection represents the world’s largest and most diverse library of crop biodiversity. Hawtin will discuss how genebanks are becoming increasingly important.
Kresovich said this event is a test pilot to see if it can develop into a speaker series.
“I have a lot of connections with World Food Prize Laureates,” Kresovich said. “If we get a good turnout and people across the University want to get more people like (Hawtin) that are at that level, we could do that. This first one is an important launch to see what kind of engagement we get and if it’s worthwhile to people.”
The event is presented by the College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences, and the Advanced Plant Technology Program.
