Cary Fowler

Dr. Fowler is the founder and President of the Food Security Leadership Council, which is dedicated to strengthening the U.S. role in global efforts to address the scourge of hunger. 

Dr. Fowler is the former Special Envoy for Global Food Security at the U.S. Department of State, where he served from 2022 to 2025, heading the Office of Global Food Security. He additionally held the position of Deputy Coordinator for Diplomacy of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s “Feed the Future” program.

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he worked within the government and with allies abroad to help Ukraine export vitally needed food supplies to global market. As a global food crisis unfolded, he worked to assist countries in need to obtain food and agricultural inputs. As a result, the Russian Federation “honored” Fowler by placing him on their sanctions list. 

During his tenure and under his leadership, the State Department together with the African Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations launched the “Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils” (VACS). VACS aims to change strategies and discourse about agricultural development by putting nutritional considerations at the center, by prioritizing efforts to improve soil fertility and integrating all of this with the improvement and promotion of nutrition-rich, African traditional and indigenous “opportunity crops.” 

Major institutions have come together to mainstream and implement this approach including FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the CGIAR, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. FAO and the CGIAR have established a joint partnership to coordinate global efforts. Ten countries and several private companies have provided funding. Many civil society organizations are involved. In 2024, G7 Leaders endorsed VACS.

Early in 1025, Fowler’s office at the State Department launched a Call-to-Action highlighting the likelihood that food productivity would fall far short of meeting food needs by 2050 due to climate change, soil erosion and declining soil fertility, inadequate and unreliable water resources, and anemic agricultural research budgets. The Call – endorsed by 128 Nobel laureates and 26 World Food Prize laureates - urges commitment to transformative “moonshot” R&D to boost productivity dramatically. 

Dr. Fowler is perhaps best known as the "father" of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, described by former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as an "inspirational symbol of peace and food security for the entire humanity." The Seed Vault provides ultimate security for more than 1,300,000 unique crop varieties, the raw material for all future plant breeding and crop improvement efforts. He proposed the creation of this Arctic facility to Norway, headed the international committee that developed the plan for its establishment, solicited and organized seed deposits from genebanks from around the world, arranged for permanent funding for the Seed Vault’s operations, and chaired the international council that oversees its operations for its first nine years.

In the early 1990s, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recruited Dr. Fowler to lead the team to produce the first global assessment of the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources. He was responsible for drafting and negotiating the first FAO Global Plan of Action on the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources, formally adopted by 150 countries in 1996. Following this, Dr. Fowler served as a Special Assistant to the Secretary General of the World Food Summit and represented the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR/World Bank) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. He chaired a series of Nordic government sponsored informal meetings of 15 countries to facilitate negotiations for this treaty.

In 2005 Dr. Fowler was chosen to lead the new Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international organization then housed at the UN's FAO in Rome. This position carried international diplomatic status. During his tenure, he built a sizable endowment and raised additional funds for international programs to conserve crop diversity and make it available for plant breeding. The Trust successfully implemented a global project to rescue 80,000 threatened crop varieties in developing countries, and launched a major effort to collect, conserve and pre-breed the wild relatives of more than 25 major crops to underpin future efforts to ensure adaptation to climate change and other challenges.

Under his leadership at the Crop Trust, the organization made its first permanent grants to ensure the conservation of crop diversity collections “in perpetuity” using the ongoing income from the Crop Trust’s endowment. Today the organization provides the core operating funding for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and completely funds the costs of maintaining the largest collection of rice genetic resources in the world. It provides complete or substantial funding for conservation efforts for additional collections held in more than ten other facilities.

In 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Fowler to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development.

Dr. Fowler was Chair of the Board of Trustees of Rhodes College for six years. He serves on the boards of the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust, the Amy Goldman Charitable Trust, and on the Science Committee of the New York Botanical Garden. He is a former member of the National Plant Genetic Resources Board (appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture) and former board and executive committee member of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. He is past chair of the board of The Livestock Conservancy.

Dr. Fowler attended Rhodes College in Memphis before transferring to Simon Fraser University in Canada where he received a B.A. (honors - first class) degree. He earned his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in Sweden. Dr. Fowler was a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences for a number of years and a visiting professor at the University of California - Davis. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University on two occasions.

He is the author of Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault which received the Nautilus Book Awards Gold Medal for the best book in the Ecology and Environment category in 2016. He is the co-author of Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, and the author of Unnatural Selection: Technology, Politics and Plant Evolution.

Cary Fowler is the recipient of the World Food Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, the Vavilov Medal, the Leadership in Science Public Service Award of the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Heinz Award, Bette Middler's Wind Beneath My Wings Award, the William Brown Award of the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Meyer Medal from the Crop Science Society of America, the Proctor Medal of the Garden Clubs of America, the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Citizen Leadership, and honorary doctorates from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Oberlin College, Rhodes College, and Simon Fraser University. He is one of two foreign elected members of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Dr. Fowler has been profiled in various major media: The New Yorker, CBS 60 Minutes, New Scientist and Wired Magazine, and is the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary film, Seeds of Time. He has given a TED Talk, lectured widely at universities, and given hundreds of TV, radio and print media interviews.

Originally from Tennessee, Cary Fowler makes his home on a small farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. He tends an orchard of more than 100 apple varieties and is engaged in the breeding/selection of grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) as a hobby. The farm is home to a flock of rare Buckeye chickens and many amusing runner ducks.

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Link to Dr. Fowler’s CV.