Letter from Des Moines: Cary Fowler, the World Food Prize and the Ghost of Norman Borlaug

The Des Moines River is not well. Decades of fertilizer runoff from Iowa’s farms have poisoned it with nitrates, and the effects are being felt statewide: surges in toxic algae blooms, drinking and swimming advisories and cancer rates that are the country’s second-highest. If the ailing water possesses an animistic soul, it may feel something like bitterness as it flows by the old city library building in downtown Des Moines. Since 2011, the riverside Beaux Arts building has been operated by the World Food Prize Foundation as a temple to industrial agriculture and the practices and chemicals that have brought Iowa’s rivers and lakes to ruin. 

In the garden stands a bronze of its patron saint, Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born apostle of industrial farming. The statue is forever pointing northwest, toward the farming hamlet of Cresco where Borlaug was born in 1914, when agriculture still had more in common with the Bronze Age than its near future. As a boy, Borlaug fertilized soil with manure and tilled it with draft animals; no patents restricted the use of the family seed stock. The age of chemical fertilizers and other “inputs” would arrive fully in Iowa only after the Second World War, part of a global system overhaul pushed by the U.S. departments of State and Agriculture, chemical and agribusiness concerns, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Borlaug spent his career at the nexus of these forces, most notably in a Rockefeller-funded lab where he developed the high-yield wheat strain that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The award made Borlaug an icon — “The man who saved a billion lives” — and a synonym for the most expansive humanitarian and scientific claims of the Green Revolution. 

Belief in Borlaug’s beneficence, currently at all-time lows, was never universal. His Nobel came at a time of deepening public and scientific alarm about the pesticide DDT, and he deployed his prominence in ferocious service to its role at the center of modern farming. Although Borlaug and industry lost the fight — the Environmental Protection Agency banned the carcinogenic pesticide in 1972 — he went down swinging. In newspapers, before Congress and at press events organized by Montrose Chemical, DDT’s biggest manufacturer, he lambasted the nascent environmental movement, beginning with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which he called a “diabolic” book that irresponsibly spurred a “vicious hysterical propaganda campaign against the use of agricultural chemicals.” In 1971, The New York Times editorialized that Borlaug was “sadly misinformed [and] apparently not even aware” of chemical farming’s dilemma: “Because pests build up a resistance to pesticides, farmers find themselves on treadmill, compelled to use more and more chemicals [to] get less and less in the way of results.” 

His fanatical championing of DDT and other chemicals may have influenced the Nobel Committee’s decision to reject Borlaug’s proposal, submitted in the mid-1980s, to create a Nobel Prize for Agriculture. Undeterred, he secured a grant from General Foods and launched the World Food Prize in 1987, awarding the inaugural laurel to his Green Revolution colleague M.S. Swaminathan. Three years later, an Iowa businessman named John Ruan endowed the foundation that continues to oversee the prize and a related event series, the Borlaug Dialogues, held every October in Des Moines. Its coffers were rounded out by corporate donations from firms that shared Borlaug’s industrial vision and political hatreds. Among the lustiest early funders of the World Food Prize Foundation was Monsanto (now Bayer Crop Science), which underwrote much of the $30 million renovation of the foundation’s building on the banks of the Des Moines. 

When Borlaug died in 2009, age 95, Monsanto was aggressively suing hundreds of family farmers in dozens of states, including Iowa, for patent infringement and “seed piracy.” The alleged violations included seed sharing — a traditional practice — and failing to stop winds from carrying patented Monsanto seeds to nearby farms (criminal “genetic drift,” according to Monsanto’s lawyers.) Borlaug stood mute on these lawsuits during his last decade, but remained sharp and combative when it came to defending controversial new biotechnologies and attacking their critics. By defending genetic modification in his final act, Borlaug bridged the Green Revolution with its 21st century sequel, which centered around genetically modified seeds and draconian intellectual property regimes. The World Food Prize Foundation is the institutional vessel for Borlaug’s ghost, a forum for the Green Revolution coalition to strategize and influence the shape and ownership of the global food system.  

Last October, the 2024 World Food Prize was awarded to a figure with a surprising pedigree: Cary Fowler, a seed activist and scholar who emerged in the 1970s as a critic of the Green Revolution. As a co-founder of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, he was a well-known gadfly in international fora, where he advocated against biotechnology and in favor of policies to undo the Green Revolution’s negative impact on global diets, biodiversity and soil health. Although Fowler has since embraced biotechnology and patents, he remains a sharp critic of other aspects of the Borlaug legacy. At the time of last October’s Borlaug Dialogues, he was serving as the Biden administration’s special envoy for food security and heading up a State Department initiative focused on Africa called the Vision for Adopted Crops and Soils, or VACS. Where the Green Revolution championed a few “high-yield” seeds for commercial crops that required lots of fertilizer and water, VACS pointed in the other direction: breeding more productive African crops that needed less of both.

How broad a rejection of the past, I wondered, did Fowler’s World Food Prize and government initiative represent? If the same actors from the old Green Revolution gang were on board with Fowler’s criticisms, what did their latest version of progress look like — and at what price were they selling it? 

Although well known in the world of food and seed policy, almost nobody had heard of Cary Fowler until his star turn as the godfather of the Global Seed Vault, an underground storage facility constructed in the Norwegian Arctic to hold more than 1 million seeds from around the world. His role overseeing the vault, completed in 2008, was the subject of countless profiles, including a documentary film, “Seeds of Time.” Most of the coverage was glowing, emphasizing Fowler’s farsightedness and his career advocating for soil health, diet and genetic diversity. 

What went unmentioned were the nagging questions related to Fowler’s embrace of restrictive seed economies organized by the big foundations and seed companies. Prior to taking on the Svalbard project, he was associated with CGIAR, a global research consortium — formerly known as Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research — at the center of debates around germplasm extraction, piracy and access. While Svalbard was under construction in 2005, Fowler became the founding director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a network of seed banks whose funders and donors include seed giants Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont Pioneer, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2010, a fellow seed activist, Kent Whealy, accused Fowler of using Svalbard to disingenuously “facilitate access by corporate breeders” and misappropriating 26,000 seed varieties from Wheely’s network of seed banks, Seed Savers.

All of this must have seemed like ancient history when, in May of 2022, the 72-year-old Fowler received the phone call that paused his retirement in the Hudson Valley, where he lives on a small farm with his billionaire wife and real estate scion, Amy Goldman. The offer to serve as special envoy for food security in the State Department was centered on the aforementioned VACS, which was organizationally nested under a broader U.S. Agency for International Development initiative, Feed the Future, for which Fowler would serve as deputy coordinator for diplomacy. “I will count on Dr. Fowler’s strategic vision and advice as we advance efforts with the international community to address the many challenges to global food security, nutrition and food systems,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a statement announcing Fowler’s new role.

The VACS initiative — a joint project of the State Department, the African Union and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization — began with a plan to develop, cultivate and promote what it called African “opportunity” crops. The initial slate covered more than 20 indigenous cereals, legumes, nuts and fruits, each selected for their potential climate resiliency and high nutrient content. While crop breeders have mostly focused on corn, rice, wheat and a few other commodity crops, VACS promised to invest in fonio, sorghum, cowpea, mung bean and okra. As Fowler explained to Scientific American, “climate change [and] the leveling off of [staple] yields” have made it necessary to build “value chains and consumer demand” around “crops out there that haven’t had that level of investment and therefore have a lot of untapped potential.” 

With the war in Ukraine highlighting global overdependence on chemically fertilized wheat, it seemed history had caught up to Fowler and other Green Revolution house critics, who alleged that the export-chemical-debt model was bad for farmers, the public and soils alike. VACS would think bigger and healthier in developing every link of new value chains — from breeding and development, to creating market demand and influencing cultural attitudes.

The more Borlaug Dialogue events I attended in Des Moines, however, the more VACS appeared to be cloaked in the language and assumptions of the first Green Revolution for which Borlaug served as hype man, and which Fowler still positioned himself against. Among the most familiar chimes was the rhetoric of “improving” indigenous seeds, delivered under the banner of “feeding the world.” The crops may be different, but VACS was centered around Green Revolution assumptions about Western technical know-how over Indigenous knowledge, as well as the importance of yields over the more salient political dimensions of persistent hunger. In a 2023 speech at the U.N., Fowler called VACS a “moonshot” to “boost agricultural productivity.” At the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Blinken said that “identifying, investing in, improving [and] delivering” Africa’s most nutritious and climate-resilient crops was a matter of U.S. and global security. 

African farmer organizations do not seem to have been consulted during the planning of the program. “Nobody from VACS’ leadership or affiliate groups ever reached out to our organization or its networks,” said Million Belay, a coordinator with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which represents nearly 40 networks and organizations representing 200 million small-scale farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk across the continent. “For years, AFSA has been leading continent-wide campaigns to promote the development of nutritious local crops, and advocated for agroecological approaches to the challenges of climate change,” Belay said. “It is revealing to us that no African farmers groups were invited to discuss the mission of VACS to ‘improve’ and ‘deliver’ indigenous crops, or ask the obvious question raised by the language of ‘opportunity’ crops: Opportunity for whom?” 

The speakers who were invited to celebrate Fowler and VACS suggest an answer. The halls of the Iowa Events Center, a few blocks from the World Food Prize Foundation, were heavy with representatives from U.S. state agencies, philanthropic foundations, Big Ag and Biotech. 

The private foundations and seed companies now eyeing Africa are doing so as “VACS champions,” a nebulous partnership category through which funding, influence and access flow. Cargill, Bayer, Syngenta, John Deere and the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are all “VACS champions,” building on the influence they already possess through involvement in VACS-connected breeding programs within the global CGIAR consortium. These “champions” are also working on the political front, following the lead of the Gates Foundation, to force the legalization of GM crops across Africa and pass so-called plant variety protection laws that grant broad intellectual property protections to commercial crop breeders and institute harsh penalties for farmers who violate them. 

“No project that is involved in advancing punitive seed patent regimes has the interest of Africans and African farmers at heart,” said AFSA’s Belay. “VACS appears to be part of a long game to extend foreign access and corporate seed economies at the expense of farmer rights, food sovereignty and alternative agriculture frameworks.” 

Fowler and other figures associated with VACS have either avoided the subject of intellectual property or downplayed the possibility that “improved” African seeds will become the exclusive property of VACS’ corporate partners. When the issue came up in an interview with MIT Technology Review, Fowler’s former deputy, Anna Nelson, said the initiative’s primary research partner, CGIAR, considers seeds to be public goods and makes its research available to governments, corporations and farmers alike, free of charge. What outside actors do with CGIAR seeds, however, is up to them — including patenting them and placing them at the center of future “value chains.”  

One morning in Des Moines, I approached Nelson and asked her how her comments about VACS being “IP-free” squared with the known views of VACS “champions” like Gates, Bayer and Syngenta. “Well,” she said, “it’s a little nuanced.”

“VACS is a movement, not a single project,” she said. “We would never fund something that would lead to proprietary [products]. That’s not to say that different members of the movement don’t have different incentives and different approaches. Obviously, every dollar Bayer spends is not going to be [going toward the] international public good. Our view is that there is space and need for everyone. VACS is about making more options available to farmers.” 

With that, Nelson excused herself. Though evasive, her comments made plain that VACS does not have an IP policy; nor would it be in a position to enforce one on its private champions even if it did. Shortly after our exchange, she joined a panel with Jennifer Crall, a vice president at Bayer Crop Science, who in her remarks repeatedly used language that echoed the (ostensibly unrelated) campaign, led by the Gates Foundation, to open up Africa to GM seeds by “harmonizing” the continent’s patent laws.  

“Is the regulatory environment allowing the farmer to access the technology he needs?” she asked. “Unfortunately, the rules are different around the world, and farmers don’t have access to the technologies that they need to feed their countries. In the U.S., you’re seeing a lot of carrots for taking up new practices, and that’s really wonderful. We just have to keep an eye on that. You have to look at the carrot and the stick.”

Crall did not need to define “the stick” for her audience. It is no secret that her company supports the passage of seed laws that include fines and even prison terms for farmers caught using “non-approved” seeds or sharing patented versions of traditional crops. Earlier that morning, the dais shared by Nelson and Crall had been occupied by the Iowa-based intellectual property firm of McKee, Voorhees and Sease, which sponsored a panel of its own, “The Seeds of Tomorrow: Protecting Plant Breeder Rights to Feed Tomorrow’s World.”  

The lack of grassroots African groups at the World Food Prize is explained by their opposition to “protecting plant breeder rights,” and their commitment to a term I did not hear uttered once in Des Moines: seed sovereignty. This is not a fringe concept, but a fundamental principle adopted by 121 states in the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, which enshrined seed sovereignty as a human right upon its passage in 2018. (The U.S. cast one of only seven “no” votes.)  

Had the World Food Prize Foundation been interested in engaging with this concept — or even recognizing it — there would have been no difficulty in finding advocates. One prominent example is the agroecology-oriented Seed and Knowledge Initiative, a multicountry southern African collaboration of farmers, community-based organizations and researchers. 

“SKI works with farmers in reviving their own diverse, nutrient rich and locally adaptive seeds,” said Frances Davies, a SKI coordinator based in Zambia. “The goal of targeting seeds for ‘improvement’ by seed companies is about producing and privileging specialized varieties that can be protected by the same intellectual property rights laws promoted by VACS ‘champions’ to extend control over African seed and agricultural systems — and ultimately markets and food systems.” 

“Despite the rhetoric about helping African farmers manage a changing climate, it’s an extraction model that extends foreign control over African seeds that for thousands of years have been the symbolic and material foundation of agrarian cultures and food systems.” 

VACS has allies in several African governments, as well as a co-sponsor in the African Union, which supports adding seed laws to the intellectual property plank of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, a slate of neoliberal reforms that went into effect in 2019. 

“We have reason to always be suspicious of policies and programs presented by the African Union, because behind the front, the big corporations are driving,” said Nnimmo Bassey, a longtime Nigerian environmental campaigner and director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation.  “VACS makes the right noises, but genetic engineering is contrary to the protection of natural varieties, and we’re concerned about it. If varieties have been lost or degraded because of pollution and environmental degradation, it’s not the place of foreign seed companies to ‘improve’ them.” 

As Blinken suggested in his remarks at Davos, VACS should also be seen in the light of U.S. national security in a world of climate disruption. Just as the titular green in the original Green Revolution signaled the opposite of “red” (and, perhaps slyly, the color of greenbacks used to buy U.S.-made inputs) today’s biotech-driven interest in the germplasm and seed laws of the Global South has a geopolitical dimension. Nowhere is this more true than in sub-Saharan Africa, where the U.S. is in open competition with a rising China for political influence and access to resources. This was the subtext of comments made in Des Moines by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who connected “aggressive investing in Africa” by U.S. trade missions to the long-term food security of the United States.

“Africa has an abundance of water, the soil has not been over-farmed, it has tremendous capacity,” said Vilsack, sounding not unlike a land broker trying to make his sales quota:

There are plant-based proteins we don’t even know about in Africa. The reality is, we’re gonna need proteins of all sizes and all kinds. We aren’t going to be able to be choosy about this. Once you get to a place where you’re exporting, which ultimately you want to do, you bring wealth, unlimited capacity. Our ability to feed the world depends on Africa. The size and magnitude of the opportunity — the U.S. enterprise and business community needs to cultivate this relationship. The more we create a presence and relationships, the more we understand Africa’s capabilities.

Following Vilsack on the main stage, the then-deputy administrator of USAID, Isobel Coleman, elaborated on how VACS complements the U.S. foreign policy toolkit in Africa. 

“Home to 12 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies,” Africa is a place of “tremendous opportunity,” said Coleman. “With smart policy reforms and increased trade, we can realize the potential of this dynamic region. With the State Department’s ‘Feed the Future’ accelerator, we are doubling down on [African] breadbaskets to feed the world.”

Although the State Department’s Feed the Future initiative survived the Trump administration’s shuttering of USAID, it does not appear to be getting much attention in Marco Rubio’s State Department. But VACS lives on. As Nelson stressed to me after her panel in Des Moines, it is a “movement” that was designed to outlive the Biden administration and USAID. Without a headquarters, spokesperson or publicity team, its diffuse work continues in research projects across Africa and, more recently, Latin America, with funding by G7 governments and its private partners. It also continues to have an ally in the World Food Prize Foundation, chaired by a former president of Corteva, the seed behemoth created by the merger of Dow and DuPont. In March, the organization named the newly unemployed Tom Vilsack as its CEO. 

Fowler, meanwhile, appears to have only semiretired to his Hudson Valley farm. In August, he gave a speech at the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, another building whose construction benefited from the support of Bayer Crop Science (formerly Monsanto). But if Fowler avoided the topic of corporate control when he was the government face of VACS, he has been liberated as a private citizen. According to St. Louis Magazine, Fowler told the audience “the answers to the world’s food insecurity issues may lie in for-profit companies” and “specifically cited Bayer … as a company that has done great work with adaptive crops and soils in Africa.”

“Why don’t we start talking about how we can, from the get-go, bring in the private sector?” the magazine quotes Fowler as saying. “Create an enabling environment so the private sector isn’t scared to come in and make a big business out of it? I think that’s where the future lies.”