Devex Dish: How the seed sector can step up for food security

Merhaba from Istanbul, Turkey! Some 1,600 delegates from seed startups, multinationals, and everything in between have descended on the city for the International Seed Federation’s World Seed Congress to chart the future of agriculture.

The setting is the Istanbul Congress Center, which peeks out onto the Bosphorus. Naturally, the baklava at the coffee stations is plentiful, and Monday’s opening ceremony kicked off with a dizzying performance by whirling dervishes. This year’s Turkish hosts are taking the food they serve very seriously, a reminder of the country’s growing status as an agricultural powerhouse. Though most people are here for the deal-making — after all, this is a $54 billion-per-year industry — the policy discussions echo those heard in the global development and United Nations universe: Namely, what’s the seed sector’s role in ensuring food security in an era of climate change, conflicts, and trade wars?

The keynote speaker was Cary Fowler, former U.S. special envoy for global food security and co-winner of the World Food Prize in 2024. “Agriculture faces a historic combination of challenges,” including climate change, soil degradation, declining water resources, rising trade restrictions, and cutting of public budgets for research and development, he said.

In a Q&A that I moderated afterward, he called on the seed sector to better ensure the financial security of the world’s seed banks — troves of plant genetic material that are crucial to biodiversity conservation and scientific research — and pointed out that the seed industry uses those freely available resources more than anyone else. Fowler said that there’s a role for both the public and private sectors in investing in underutilized “opportunity crops” — traditional or indigenous crops that may contain genetic traits to improve food and nutrition security. He also stressed the key role of crop diversity: “We have to get crop adaptation right, and that is where all of you fit in. There is absolutely nothing more basic to agriculture and your business than genetic resources, than the diversity of crops.”

It was a crucial conversation at an event with many Big Ag industry reps — Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta among them — whose dominance and focus on profits, according to some seed policy experts, will never solve food insecurity and in some ways even contribute to it. Fowler warned that the sector will face growing scrutiny.

So who should pay for the conservation of crop diversity? And how can seed companies be incentivized to contribute? Those questions have been coming up all week. In the case of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit that supports the world’s seed banks, the seed sector has contributed only 2% of the $300 million endowment fund the Crop Trust has built over the past two decades. “It is a global public good. But I think the private sector should and could step up,” the nonprofit’s executive director, Stefan Schmitz, said during a panel. “Those seeds ensure the business of the private sector will still run 20 years from now.”

Asked why they may resist paying for access to these resources, companies often say that the systems governing them can be complex. “Let’s not use the complexity … as an excuse for inaction,” said Kent Nnadozie, Secretary of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, during another panel. “Companies have to continuously deal with complexity, both in the environment and in the technology they use and in the market.”

“I wouldn't say that companies are not willing to pay when it comes to access to and use of genetic resources,” said Jasmina Muminovic, head of genetic resources at Bayer, pointing out that they already pay royalties, licensing fees, and other operational costs. Rather, she said, the return on investment for using publicly accessible genetic material in commercial plant breeding is always a bit of a gamble.

High on everyone’s list of concerns are trade and tariffs: Developing, breeding, and distributing seeds is a global process, and no country is self-sufficient in producing all the food its people consume. That means the rise of protectionist trade policies and tariffs threatens not just companies’ bottom lines, but food security. 

“What we all need to work toward is to make the international trading system more reliable,” said Doaa Abdel-Motaal, senior counselor for the World Trade Organization’s Agriculture and Commodities Division. “We need to make sure export restrictions are not used at random. There need to be very strict rules on cutting off the supply of food at the international level, and we have to continue to open markets, reduce subsidies that create unfair competition, and reduce tariffs.”

From our archives:

• Opinion: Food security in a climate crisis must start with seeds

• And a counteropinion: Big corps controlling seeds will never solve food insecurity 

• Related: 150 Nobel and World Food Prize winners call for food security ‘moonshot’

(Barely) feeding the future

Over in Washington, D.C., confusion reigns about the future of various U.S. foreign food aid programs. At a Senate hearing yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced support for programs such as Food for Peace Title II — which purchases surplus food commodities grown by American farmers and distributes them to those in need abroad, and which President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposes eliminating.

Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas and food aid supporter representing a farming-heavy state, questioned Rubio about how food aid would work under a restructured State Department aid apparatus. Rubio said it will be overseen by the new bureau on humanitarian affairs and foreign aid, though there is not yet a nominee to run it.

Moran has consponsored a bill to transfer responsibility of Food for Peace to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which Rubio said would “generally align” with the White House’s priorities. When asked about the separate McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which buys U.S. agricultural commodities to support school meals abroad, Rubio said “we have not made any determinations yet” — but Politico reports that USDA, which purchases food from farmers for the program, plans to cancel its grants.

On Feed the Future, another former USAID program which helped strengthen food security by investing in local agriculture, Rubio said: “Imagine if you’re an ambassador in a country that has a chronic food shortage, and you’re somehow able to provide them American ingenuity that allows them to produce more food at a lower cost using less land. That’s an extraordinary thing to offer as part of our toolbox.” It’s the kind of foreign aid he likes — the kind that ends. It can also create potential business opportunities for U.S. companies, he said. But whether Rubio likes the Feed the Future or not, continuing it at the State Department will be difficult: Nearly everyone who worked on the program was eliminated in the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID.

Read: Death, reform, and power — Rubio spars with Senate over USAID cuts 

See also: Trump budget proposes unprecedented, ‘reckless’ cuts to foreign aid

And don’t miss: The fight to save Food for Peace amid Washington’s war on aid

From MAGA to MAHA

Meanwhile, in Geneva, Switzerland, my colleagues are closely following the 78th World Health Assembly, the annual decision-making gathering of World Health Organization member states. (ICYMI, they finally adopted a pandemic agreement after three years of negotiations.) In the coming days two nutrition-related resolutions will be up for adoption: One that would extend the deadline for implementing a global plan on maternal and child nutrition to 2030, and another on restricting the digital marketing of breastmilk substitutes. Stay tuned for updates.

What caught our eye on Tuesday was a video address by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who invited health ministers to join the U.S. in “a new era of cooperation.” The U.S. did not send an official delegation to this year’s WHA, and under the Trump administration it has withdrawn from WHO. But that didn’t stop RFK Jr. from throwing punches, writes my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo. 

Among the public health measures RFK Jr. highlighted are “removing food dyes and other harmful additives from our food supply” and reducing “consumption of ultra processed foods, and we're going to support lifestyle changes that will bolster the immune systems and transform the health of our people.” These efforts don’t “lend themselves easily to profits or serve established special interests,” he added, and it’s that very kind of “systemic overhaul” of priorities that the U.S. would like to see on the global stage.

These issues are part of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has sparked debate among nutrition advocates because he promotes some of the very issues they’ve long championed: Namely, a focus on chronic diseases and obesity, health eating, and targeting industrial food companies. Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, has said, “RFK sounds just like me.” The problem, others argue, is that the narrow issues he promotes don’t constitute an overall public health strategy — not to mention the dangers of his anti-vaccine stance.

Read: US still wants global health cooperation, but not through WHO

And don’t miss: Nutrition issues to watch at the 78th World Health Assembly

+ Our team of global health reporters is in Geneva for WHA78, and tomorrow, May 22, they will interview leaders and innovators to tackle the most pressing issues, from funding freezes to climate change and workforce shortages, and shape global health’s future! If you’re in town, request an invite to join us in person, or register to watch online. 

Failing grade

Amid all the food policy discussions, here’s a sobering reminder of why it all matters: More than 295 million people in 53 countries faced acute food insecurity last year, according to the latest Global Report on Food Crises, which came out Friday. The figure is skyrocketing amid escalating conflict, economic shocks, and extreme weather — and aid cuts are making it all much worse.

Furthermore, some 1.9 million people faced famine last year, more than double the figure a year prior. Over half of them are in the Gaza Strip, whose entire population faces imminent famine today.  

“This is more than a failure of systems — it is a failure of humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in the foreword. At last week’s report launch, World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain warned that millions of people will lose access to food aid in the coming months due to a historic budget shortfall. The agency will cut 30% of its workforce by next year.

WFP also might not be able to keep running its Humanitarian Air Service. The fleet of more than 130 aircraft delivers lifesaving assistance in places where no other transportation options are available because they’re too remote or besieged by conflict — but it faced a massive $206 million funding shortfall as of February.

Read: Hunger soars amid conflict, extreme weather, and aid cuts, UN says 

See also: WFP to cut up to 30% of staff amid aid shortfall

Chew on this

Who owns our seeds? Africa’s future depends on the answer. [Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa’s Million Belay via LinkedIn]

U.S. aid cuts leave more than 60,000 metric tons of food aid, which could feed 3.5 million people for a month, moldering in storage. [Reuters]

Have I got a deal for you: Rwanda, Qatar, Turkey, and other countries are pitching the United Nations to move some functions to their cities as it seeks cost-savings amid a shrinking budget. [Devex] 

Deforestation skyrockets as Brazil plans forest-focused COP30. [Devex]

Adva Saldinger and Jenny Lei Ravelo contributed to this edition of Devex Dish.