16 June 2008

Two Former U.S. Senators Named 2008 World Food Prize Recipients

Senators’ program has fed 22 million children in 41 countries

The U.S. school feeding program helps girls get an education and receive nutritious lunches.

By Kathryn McConnell
Staff Writer

Washington -- Two of America's most noted senior statesmen have been named recipients of the 2008 World Food Prize.

Former senators George McGovern and Bob Dole will accept the prize during a symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, October 16 for their leadership in passing legislation to establish the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. The date has been named World Food Day by the United Nations.

The prize announcement came during a June 12 ceremony at the State Department.

The World Food Prize is awarded annually to individuals whose efforts have made significant contributions to improving the quality, quantity and availability of food in the world.  The honor is awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation based in Des Moines, Iowa.

The prize was established in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, recognized around the world as "Father of the Green Revolution." Borlaug is credited with saving millions of lives from starvation during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The McGovern-Dole program, established in 2000, donates U.S. agricultural commodities, as well as financial and technical support for school-feeding and maternal and preschool child nutrition projects, to low-income countries committed to education for boys and girls.

It has provided meals to more than 22 million children in 41 countries and boosted school attendance by 17 percent for girls and by 14 percent for girls and boys combined, according to a World Food Prize (WFP) press release.

The program has increased international support for the expansion of school-feeding operations in developing countries. It is touted as one reason the U.N. World Food Programme's school-feeding operations have nearly doubled since 2001. In 2006 alone, that program fed more than 20 million children in 74 countries, according to the foundation.

The world's leading industrialized nations -– known as the Group of 8 -– and the New Partnership for Africa's Development consider school-feeding programs an important tool for alleviating poverty.

The McGovern-Dole program uses food for more than nutrition, but also as an incentive to boost school enrollment and academic performance, especially for girls, whose education often is neglected when families can pay for only some children to go to school. The program also provides food to pregnant women, nursing mothers, infants and preschool children to improve all children’s ability to learn when they enter school.

The McGovern-Dole program emphasizes overcoming gender inequalities in education.

In 2007, the World Food Prize was awarded to U.S. food scientist Philip Nelson, who developed technologies that made possible large-scale storage, packaging and transportation over long distances of fruit and vegetables, while protecting their nutritional value.

In 2006, the prize was shared by U.S. citizen A. Colin McClung and Brazilians H.E. Alysson Paolinelli and Edson Lobato for their roles in transforming the Cerrado region of Brazil -- an area of vast, once infertile tropical high plains -- into highly productive cropland.

Other past recipients include:

2005 -- Modadugu Gupta of India. Gupta developed low-cost technologies to increase fish-farm yields and educated impoverished farmers, specifically women, in freshwater aquaculture practices.

2004 -- Yuan Longping of China and Monty Jones of Sierra Leone. Yuan's work led to successful and widely grown hybrid rice varieties. Jones pioneered efforts to develop a new variety of rice for Africa by recapturing the genetic potential of the continent's ancient rice strains.

2003 -- Catherine Bertini of the United States. Executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme from 1992 to 2002, Bertini helped transform that agency into the world’s largest humanitarian relief organization.

2002 -- Pedro Sanchez of the United States. Sanchez pioneered ways to restore fertility to the most degraded soils in Latin America and Africa.

2001 -- Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Denmark. Pinstrup-Andersen researched ways governments could reform their food subsidy programs. He is a former head of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

2000 -- Evangelina Villegas of Mexico and Surinder Vasal of India. Villegas, a cereal chemist, and Vasal, a plant geneticist, developed maize with significantly more usable protein than normal maize.

Dole is a former leader of the Senate and McGovern is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations food agencies. Both also are former U.S. presidential candidates.

This year's fall symposium will focus on "Confronting Crisis: Agriculture and Global Development in the Next 50 Years."

More information about the World Food Prize and symposium, named in honor of Borlaug, is available on the WFP Web site.