2010 World Food Prize Recognizes Grassroots Hunger-Fighters

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug created the World Food Prize in 1986 to recognize important contributions to improving the world's food supply. It's become the world's foremost honor for "the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world."

The just-announced 2010 Laureates — David Beckmann and Jo Luck — are both innovators in grassroots efforts to help fight hunger and poverty around the world. They have each shaped their organizations, Bread for the World and Heifer International, into leaders in global poverty-alleviation and hunger-reduction by figuring out the best ways to inspire widespread support and action.

Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor and economist, heads Bread for the World, "a collective Christian voice urging decision makers to end hunger at home and abroad." The organization has inspired at least a quarter of a million constituents every year to contact their elected officials to demand policies that help the world's poor get enough food.

As CEO of Heifer International, Luck has helped 12 million families feed themselves by getting donors to provide them with food- and income-producing animals. Luck has institutionalized the idea of "paying it forward," or, in Heifer-ese, “Passing on the Gift,” a policy that asks every family that receives an animal to give one of the animal's female offspring to another needy family. The gifts allow families to sustain themselves, leading to greater independence, self-empowerment, and food security.

Innovators like Beckmann and Luck teach us more than just the technicalities of how to feed hungry people around the world. These types of visionaries are looking at systems and institutions in new ways and forging new paths to help fix old problems. This type of thinking is what we need in every aspect of the world's food systems.

Around the U.S., people are similarly engaged in looking at our own food systems in new ways. Folks across the country are finding ways to work in food kitchens and community gardens, change policies to help feed more hungry children and level the playing field for small food producers, and campaign to support small farmers.

What all these people demonstrate is that when things seem hopeless, there's always something that can be done if you have the heart and the will. All you need is to look at things with new eyes and get busy working in innovative ways.

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