World Food Prize Highlights Development and Security

Gebisa Ejeta started off as a boy living in a mud hut in rural Ethiopia and walking 25 miles each week to attend school in town. Back then it might have seemed improbable that fifty years later he would win a $250,000 international prize for groundbreaking advances in biology.

But this brilliant academic star ascended through the ranks of his country’s school system and then set off to the U.S. to earn his PhD in plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University. He now holds a distinguished professorship there and is widely regarded as a global leader in the development of drought-resistant crops that help the world’s farmers make ends meet.

Last Thursday he was awarded the World Food Prize for his development of sorghum hybrids that are able to grow in arid areas and fend off the debilitating Striga weed. These innovations, according to the prize Website, have “dramatically increased the production and availability of one of the world’s five principal grains and enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Dr. Ejeta is also honored for working tirelessly to push economic development and empower small-holder farmers via agricultural advancements across rural Africa. His work has helped small farmers produce more crops, improve nutritional and gain more income from agricultural activities, and boost the profitability, changes that have brought fundamental changes to millions of African lives and livelihoods.

The prize, created by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug in 1986 and sponsored by businessman/philanthropist John Ruan since 1990, highlights how vital a nutritious and sustainable food supply is for everyone on Earth.

The award was given at a ceremony during the 2009 “Borlaug Dialogue“ on the topic of “Food, Agriculture, and National Security in a Globalized World,” which took place in Des Moines, Iowa, October 14 to 16. The dialogue and this year’s choice of Laureate both emphasize that food and nutrition are increasingly understood by the international community as playing key roles in national and international security challenges and in the dynamics of economic, political and environmental shifts.

There is hardly anything, after all, more important to the human species than food. Water, perhaps, but that’s pretty much it. The need for food and water is, like the desire for money and power, a fundamental driver of global events. We should all take a hint from Dr. Ejeta and ask ourselves how food's development, production and distribution fit into the bigger picture of our specie’s life on Earth.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Talbot of the World Resources Institute Staff, via flickr