DES
MOINES, Iowa, Oct. 21, 2015 - The 2015 World
Food Prize
ceremony and conference shined a spotlight on women and sustainable agriculture
from start to finish.
For
starters, the World Food Prize went to Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of a Bangladeshi
relief organization (BRAC) that focuses primarily on empowering women and
girls. Since 1990, BRAC has helped nearly 150 million hungry, impoverished and
disenfranchised individuals obtain healthcare, technical training, education
and microfinancing for small businesses across 11 countries. Currently the
non-profit operates a university, a bank, and several social enterprises that
together employ over 120,000 people, making BRAC the world’s largest
non-governmental organization.
The
events held in Abed’s honor in Des Moines, Iowa, last week included a laureate
ceremony in the Iowa State Capitol, presided over by the state’s long-time
Republican Gov. Terry Branstad and attended by Iowa’s former governor, U.S.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The state’s female legislative leadership
received special recognition from WFP Foundation President Kenneth Quinn, and
they later joined an all-female chorus to sing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” at
the close of the ceremony.
Abed’s
work to end poverty and empower women was honored at several luncheons peppered
throughout the “Borlaug Dialogues – a series of informational
discussions named in honor of Norman Borlaug, the American biologist and Nobel
Peace Prize winner credited with saving the lives of a billion people with
hybrid wheat he developed in the 1950s. Here are some highlights from the
event.
"Women are a crucial, vital and necessary
part of solving the challenge of alleviating hunger,” Chelsea Clinton,
vice chair of the Clinton Foundation emphasized: About 800 million people
"aren't getting the nutritious food they need,” she added.
Robb Fraley, technology officer at
Monsanto, joined Clinton later for a panel discussion and said about 3 million
kids in the country will graduate with degrees in STEM — science,
technology, engineering and mathematics — over the next 10 years. But less
than 175,000 will work in STEM jobs, which will total 2
million. "We're in a deficit," he said, while pointing out that
“encouraging more women to become doctors, scientists and engineers will
be critical to meeting challenges facing the country and the world.”
Reversing those signals can be
challenging, Clinton said. "Starting in middle school, teachers both male
and female, start calling on girls less in math and science classes, which
sends a pretty clear message that their opinions just don't matter as
much."
Cargill CEO David MacLennan
said the Minneapolis-based company learned an important lesson decades ago
that’s still relevant: "Change in the global food system is
constant," he said. "But change also has created enormous gains for
humanity."
Chris Policinski, CEO of Land
O'Lakes, said a "war against science" is making it difficult for
the agricultural industry to attract the talented workers it needs to meet
the growing need for food. Policinski said consumers are getting much of their
information about food from the Internet and it "has given rise to a
situation where opinion and nostalgia, maybe a political or economic
agenda, colors the discussion around our food supply."
DuPont executive vice president Jim
Borel says the key to solving global food security issues is innovation.
"We need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have
produced in the past 10,000 years," he said. And "we're
currently living beyond our means. We consume 50 percent more natural resources
than our ecosystems can replenish."
Panelist
Howard Buffett, an American philanthropist and Illinois farmer, shared how
employing sustainable farming practices – in particular cover crops, crop
rotations and no-till – improves productivity on both small and large farming
operations. “You can do amazing things (in agriculture) if you know how to use
nature,” Buffett told the audience. Using conservation farming practices to
minimize soil disturbance, like cover crops for instance, “is hard to figure
out” – “that’s why a lot of farmers don’t do it,” he said, but it’s worth it.
The cornfields on which he seeded cover tasseled out almost 15 days after the
fields that didn’t have cover – accounting for a 20-bushel an acre difference
in yield.
Sustainable
agriculture was also the focus of this year’s Global Agricultural Productivity
(GAP) report, which
was released by the Global Harvest Initiative (GHI). To increase ag
production sustainably, the report recommends policymakers and agricultural
producers use the latest conservation and management practices to
simultaneously deliver greater yields and meet higher demand for protein, all
while reducing agriculture's environmental footprint.
#30
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