The winner of the 2009 World Food Prize: Gabisa Ejeta

One of the problems of only doing this blog in our spare time is that we miss a lot of important stories. We realized this morning that we forgot to make mention of the 2009 winner of the World Food Prize awarded last week. The World Food Prize is similar to the Nobel Peace Prize, but this prize is given to scientists who make new innovations to help feed the world.

This years winner is Gebisa Ejeta, a professor of agronomy at Purdue University. Ejeta hails from Ethiopia and remembers from his time there the use of the grain sorghum as a staple of the East African diet. His innovations have multiplied sorghum yields many, many times over.

From USA Today, writer Elizabeth Weise details Ejeta's work.

"A lot of people who grew up it the Midwest in the '40s and '50s would remember the old syrup for pancakes, made of milo," as sorghum is sometimes called there, he says.

It's also used to make gluten-free beers for people with celiac disease. But in Africa and Asia, it's a major grain, used in porridge and bread, in making beer and popping like popcorn.

Sorghum feeds 500 million to 700 million people worldwide, Ejeta says. "It's a huge crop in Africa; it's a very important crop in India. In China it's used for making their national alcoholic beverage," baijiu, or white liquor.
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Ejeta, born in a one-room thatched hut in west-central Ethiopia, walked 12 miles to attend a nearby school, returning home only on the weekends. After graduating from Alemaya College in eastern Ethiopia, he received a Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics from Purdue in 1978.

His then began to work on new sorghum varieties as a researcher at the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Sudan. Ejeta's hybrid, released in 1983, had yields 150% greater than local sorghum. By 1999, 1 million acres were being harvested by Sudanese farmers, feeding millions in that country. Ejeta also developed a drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid that fit conditions in Niger, which yielded four to five times the national sorghum average for that country.

Next, Ejeta turned his focus to a hugely harmful weed called striga, commonly known as witchweed. This parasite lives off corn, rice, millet, sugar cane and sorghum in much the way that mistletoe lives off trees. The United Nations estimates that it infests up to 40% of the arable savannah land in Africa.

"There was a small area in North and South Carolina that had striga in the 1950s," Ejeta says. "It took the USDA nearly 30 years to eradicate it."

Working with colleagues at Purdue, Ejeta bred a sorghum variety that is resistant to witchweed. Various aid groups have distributed the seed in numerous African countries. Yields have increased as much as four times over local varieties, even in times of severe drought.