Governments must do more to diversify the types of crops grown throughout the world. If they don’t, climate change may jeopardize the global food supply, a leading agriculture researcher told a Stanford audience.

Cary Fowler, a senior advisor and former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was a driving force behind the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Commonly known as the “doomsday vault,” the repository of ancient and modern seeds from around the world ensures that future generations will have access to a wide enough range of crop traits to adapt global agriculture to a changing climate.

During a May 6 talk sponsored by FSE as part of the center’s Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium, Fowler warned that increasingly high temperatures and water shortages interfere with the natural growing cycles of many crops and can even reduce the nutritional quality of some plants. Higher temperatures also give way to new pests, diseases, and soil microorganisms that threaten yields.

 “The biggest impacts from climate change will be in sub-Saharan Africa,” Fowler said, a region where many people already suffer serious poverty and hunger, and where crop yields lag behind the rest of the world. Fowler said that as climate pressure on agriculture intensifies, the world can expect to see an uptick in civil conflict, restrictive trade policies, and suffering among the world’s poorest people.

“Crops are going to be facing new combinations of conditions for which there is no historical experience,” said Fowler. “They will require new combinations of traits” that can only be developed by preserving genetic diversity and proactively breeding new varieties.

 “There are 1.3 billion people living on subsistence farms today,” said Dr. Cary Fowler to a Stanford audience on May 6. “How will they adapt to climate change without access to diversity?”

Fowler called for the U.S. and foreign governments to embrace their “inherited evolutionary responsibility” for preserving the huge diversity of crops grown by farmers throughout human history.

The United States is the ideal candidate to lead the world in using crop genetic diversity to adapt agriculture to climate challenges, he said. “The U.S. is well-positioned to research diversity, model future climate and assemble seed packages,” enlisting farmers in the U.S. and abroad in “another mass adaptation experiment” like the one American agriculture undertook in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

 “I know that sounds like a wild and crazy idea,” Fowler said. “But I haven’t heard any alternatives to it. If we’re assuming we’re going to have development without diversity, that would really be a historically unprecedented experiment.”

 “If agriculture doesn’t adapt,” he added, “neither will we.”

A diverse history

In the late 1700s the United States food system lacked diversity and infrastructure. “Very few of the crops we grow now in the U.S. are native,” said Fowler. Early on, “it wasn’t always evident what crops from abroad would grow well in the U.S.”

The government soon set out to expand and diversify American agriculture. U.S. Navy ships collected seeds on overseas voyages, and U.S. diplomats brought back new crops from postings abroad. Government-sponsored expeditions sought out foreign plants with specific disease-resistant traits. The U.S. signed two dozen seed-exchange agreements with other countries, and lowered taxes on imported seeds to boost global crop exchange.

“The United States amassed a much more diverse array of seeds and crops as a result,” said Fowler. One program introduced 600 new apple varieties, 700 new types of pears, and 353 new varieties of mangoes to American farmers.

But the United States did not simply collect new crops. It also invested in research to develop new varieties, including through plant breeding.

Genetic erosion

Research into plant breeding quickly yielded many of the modern varieties of crops we grow today in the United States.

“With plant breeding came the rise of modern varieties that had useful traits like disease resistance,” said Fowler. A small handful of new varieties quickly gained popularity with American farmers, who now had a choice about whether or not to save seeds and grow many varieties of a crop at once. Most farmers chose not to, instead relying on the same few mainstream varieties their neighbors were growing.

This shift has led to what Fowler described as the “genetic erosion” of agriculture, a trend that can only be reversed by reviving the tradition of seed saving and plant breeding on a global scale.

Seed banks

“I have probably been to more seed banks than any other person,” said Fowler. Seeds from most crops can survive hundreds or even thousands of years in storage, but most storage facilities lack the physical security to provide lasting safe haven. Many seed banks are poorly built, too warm or humid for long-term storage, and vulnerable to natural disasters. Other facilities suffer damaged during civil wars and uprisings.

Even if banks are physically secure, said Fowler, most simply do not operate on a large enough scale to protect global crop diversity. “Most crops in the world have between one and 10 total seed samples in storage, and most have no plant breeders working on them at all,” said Fowler.

The doomsday vault

In 2005 Fowler was chosen to lead an international coalition to build the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Norwegian government owns the facility, and it is also managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. 

 

The vault is built into the side of a mountain in the far north of Norway, said Fowler, because the ideal temperature for storing seeds is minus 18 degrees Celsius.

Inside the frozen walls of the vault are shelves full of boxes holding duplicate seeds from smaller seed banks around the world. Foreign governments that contribute samples pay nothing for storage, and the seed packages are never opened by vault staff, said Fowler.

 “The vault now houses seeds from over 864,000 varieties of plants,” said Fowler, adding that not a single sample has ever been lost.

The facility’s nickname, “the doomsday vault,” comes not only from its rugged physical location but from its capacity to withstand disasters – something its planners took great care to design. “We calculated how high the water would go if all ice in the world melted and we had the world’s largest ever tsunami,” said Fowler. “The vault is five stories above that.”

“Not a solution”

Fowler emphasized that no doomsday vault, no matter how secure its walls or how ample its seed collection, can solve the problem of crop genetic erosion. Building a vault “doesn’t mean that we as a society are getting serious about adapting agriculture to climate change,” Fowler said. Plant breeding and crop research programs focused on developing new climate-resilient varieties are just as crucial as saving seeds.

Although a few major staple crops like rice, wheat and corn are continually bred and improved in research labs around the world, most crops are largely ignored by researchers. For example, there are only six breeders of yams worldwide.

“Why conserve it if you’re not going to use it?” Fowler asked. “We are acting like crops are going to adapt by themselves, and we are assuming all but a handful of crops are unimportant.”

Quoting Charles Darwin, Fowler added that “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

---

Full video and audio recordings of Dr. Fowler's May 6 lecture, and his interview with FSE director Roz Naylor, are available here. 

Japan must transform its economy in a way that mirrors the innovation ethos in places like Silicon Valley and Stanford University, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday during a speech on campus.

As an example of how to encourage such creativity, Abe hailed a new partnership starting this fall with Stanford that will train the next generation of biomedical experts. In doing so, he urged a "fundamental change" in how Japanese society views the process of innovation, from how ideas originate to competition in the marketplace.

Japan Biodesign will be launched in collaboration with the Stanford Biodesign program and five higher education and research institutions in Japan. Faculty members will work together to create new interdisciplinary systems based on Stanford Biodesign. Stanford leaders will train and mentor their Japanese colleagues.

Abe, who is the first Japanese prime minister to visit Stanford, marveled at how the tech sector in the United States has "consistently evolved at top speed."

He said, "I want the best and brightest Japanese talent" to learn about Silicon Valley.

The Japanese leader also announced more plans to connect Japanese companies, employees and networking events with Silicon Valley and places like Stanford. He said it was important for the participants to emerge "reborn" with a well-honed sense of how to succeed in a highly competitive global marketplace.

Abe shared the Bing Concert Hall stage with Stanford President John Hennessy and George Shultz, the former U.S. Secretary of State and distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. Abe's talk, titled "Innovation, Japan and Silicon Valley Symposium," included an introduction and remarks by Hennessy and Shultz. The event drew a full house of invited guests and members of the Stanford community.

"It is a great honor" to be at Stanford, Abe said in beginning his remarks.

He noted that Japan is revisiting its regulatory and tax systems in order to encourage more economic dynamism and competition. "The Japanese people will benefit from innovation," he said.

The challenge, he acknowledged, has been the slow pace of innovation in Japan. Today, however, the Internet economy and big data are creating "enormous changes" in his country's economic approach, he said. "We have to catch up, or otherwise Japan will lose vitality," Abe added.

Cultural connections

In his introduction of Abe, Hennessy chronicled Stanford's long history and friendship with Japan and its people.

Japan, he said, is home to more Stanford alumni than any other Asian country, and when the university's doors first opened in 1891, the pioneer class included a Japanese student. Currently, 139 students from Japan are enrolled at Stanford.

Hennessey described Abe as focused on revitalizing Japan's economy and stewarding it toward a greater global role.

Shultz, who knew Abe's parents, shared recollections of poignant moments between Abe's politically prominent family and his own.

Abe joined a roundtable discussion after his speech with Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanford Board of Trustees Chair Steve Denning; Stanford School of Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor; Stanford political science Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang; and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, among other scholars and dignitaries. He also met with Stanford students before leaving campus.

Afterward, McFaul wrote in an email, "I think it is fantastic that Prime Minister Abe came to Stanford and Silicon Valley after his very successful visit to Washington. He demonstrated that deepening U.S.-Japanese relations requires not only strong government-to-government ties, but also deepening ties between our societies, including educational institutions like Stanford."

Abe's state visit to the United States this week included the first address by a Japanese leader to a joint session of Congress. Abe served as prime minister of Japan in 2006-07 and returned to the position in 2012.

'Working together'

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama said after a meeting with Abe that the two countries had made progress in trade talks on a massive 12-nation trade deal that would open markets around the Pacific Rim to U.S. exports. Both nations face domestic political obstacles to concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

"This agreement would expand the coverage of the free trade agreements for both Japan and the U.S. substantially," said Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi, director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in an interview. "The U.S. and Japan have been working together to maintain peace and sustain economic growth in the Pacific Asia."

Hoshi said that Abe's visit to the Silicon Valley confirms that Japan is serious about transforming its economy from one based on exports to one focused on innovations.

"Going forward, we can learn a lot from Japanese experience and their reform attempts," said Hoshi, who is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Hoshi spoke with The Associated Press just before Abe’s arrival to California, citing Silicon Valley as the ideal place for Japan to learn about innovation. He also joined KQED’s Forum to discuss the current state of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Later, he was interviewed by BBC Business about Abe's visit to Stanford.

Stanford Biodesign

Founded in 2001, Stanford Biodesign has pioneered a new training methodology in which interdisciplinary teams of engineers and physicians go through a rigorous process of carefully characterizing unsolved clinical needs before jumping to technology solutions.

For the Japan Biodesign program, the bulk of the educational activities will take place at the campuses of the partner Japanese universities.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.