DES MOINES (AP) — Former presidential candidates Bob Dole and George McGovern share a common bond — but it’s not what you think.

Dole, a Kansas Republican, and McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat, both saw their presidential ambitions quashed in landslide elections. But the former senators are being honored in Des Moines this week as winners of the World Food Prize for their efforts to curb hunger in the world.

“There’s a significant message that’s included by having them both honored, one Democrat, one Republican,” said Kenneth M. Quinn, the president of the World Food Prize Foundation. “That’s a message at the center of Norman Borlaug’s achievements: When people are hungry, partisan politics is put aside and people can come together across political divides to ensure there is adequate food.”

Borlaug, a native Iowan and the winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for spurring the so-called “Green Revolution,” established the World Food Prize in 1986 to honor the efforts of those who work to solve global hunger problems. The distinction carries with it a $250,000 cash prize, which Dole and McGovern will split.

Observers have called the prize the Nobel Prize for hunger. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus, the 1994 World Food Prize Laureate, went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to create economic and social development from below.”

The Nobel committee honored Yunus for the same work that the World Food Prize Foundation had — working to develop so-called micro credit to promote banking in the poor countries.

Dole and McGovern are being honored for creating the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Nutrition Program. Established in 2000, the program has provided more than 22 million meals to children in 41 countries. Dole and McGovern will be formally recognized on Thursday, though they were announced as winners of the prize in June.

The award presentation to Dole and McGovern will be only part of the festivities this week for a foundation that has prided itself on being prescient about issues of global hunger. For the second year, there will be an Iowa Hunger Summit on Tuesday, followed by a two-day symposium with prominent speakers from government, private industry and philanthropy.

This year’s topic is “Confronting Crisis: Agriculture and Global Development in the Next Fifty Years.”

Foundation spokesman Justin Cremer said that this year’s forum was coming at a particularly apt time because the world has been suffering through food shortage and worry has grown about escalating costs of food.

“We put the agenda together this year before the crisis, on a world scale, had really become what it is,” he said. “This isn’t the first time you could say we’ve been ahead of the curve. Back in 2001, before Sept. 11, the symposium topic was already set as agri-terrorism.

“We pride ourselves on starting important conversations here,” he said.

Frank Swoboda, the foundation’s director of planning, said a number of high-profile speakers will guarantee a provocative discussion this year. Those speakers include Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of global development for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer; and Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank.

Swoboda said the roster of speakers would amplify the message Dole and McGovern were bringing to Des Moines.

“From the perspective of the symposium and the Borlaug Dialogue, having the senators and the group of really huge, world leaders here shows how important these issues are,” he said. “It’s terrific for us and it’s terrific for the issue.”