It all started with the Nobel Prize.

In the 1980s, Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, approached the Nobel committee and asked them to add an agriculture award to their annual ceremony. Alfred Nobel, however, did not specify agriculture as a “prize area” in his will, so Borlaug was rejected.

Iowa-native Borlaug, widely acknowledged as the father of the “Green Revolution,” set out to create his own agriculture award that would recognize outstanding efforts to make “nutritious and sustainable food” available to all peoples of the world. Borlaug’s own work in agriculture helped create disease-resistant wheat varieties with high yields. In 1987, he awarded the first World Food Prize of $250,000 to M.S. Swaminathan of India for improving agricultural yields.

Soil scientist Pedro Sanchez will receive the 2002 World Food Prize Thursday evening in a ceremony at Stephens Auditorium. Sanchez, according to the World Food Prize Web site at www.worldfoodprize.org, has worked to reduce hunger in developing countries by “transforming depleted tropical soils into productive agricultural lands.” Working in both Brazil and East Africa, Sanchez has helped to restore nutrients to soils and increase crop yields. He is currently chairman of Kofi Annan’s United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on World Hunger.

“It’s amazing that this is in Iowa”

The World Food Prize is based out of Des Moines, and financed by John Ruan, owner of Ruan Transportation Management Systems. Laureates of the prize are dotted around the globe, and Kenneth Quinn, president of the foundation, is former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia.

“It’s amazing that this is in Iowa,” says Keegan Kautzky, junior in political science and intern at the World Food Prize. “The people who come here are incredible. The second week I was here, I was sitting next to Norman Borlaug, and thinking that here’s one of the most important people in the world today.”

The World Food Prize is divided into three sections: laureate ceremony, international symposium and youth institute. The laureate ceremony honors the recipient of the World Food Prize, and will be held Thursday night at Stephens Auditorium.

The international symposium provides a forum for experts to examine cutting-edge issues in international affairs, says Jayson White, director of communications for World Food Prize. Previous topics have included agroterrorist and bioterrorist threats, and this year will focus on managing shortages of fresh water.

“Wars in the past have been fought over land and oil,” White says. “In the next decade, however, we’ll be fighting over water [as it becomes a scarce resource].”

More than 700 national and international experts on water policy will converge in Des Moines this weekend to address issues of water quality, White says. Dignitaries include Elsa Murano, United State Department of Agriculture undersecretary for food safety; Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; and Andrew Natsios, administrator for United States Agency for International Development.

High school students from Iowa and across the world will get a chance to pick the experts’ brains and present papers at the Youth Institute on Oct. 24-26 in Des Moines.

Eight Weeks in the Philippines

Most high school seniors are happy if they get an A on a research paper. Martha Pope spent eight weeks in the Philippines after writing hers.

Pope, senior in political science, wrote a paper on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa her senior year in high school in Mason City. She presented her paper at the Youth Institute, and landed an internship with the World Food Prize.

For her internship, Pope worked for the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines, about 60 kilometers south of Manila. She participated in a microcredit program, which studied the effect of loans versus direct assistance to people in need.

“Banks come to poor people, and give them loans from $20 to $200, American- something very small and manageable. They pay it back at a 2 percent rate each week, so it’s not a burden on them at all. They use it to get their kids through school, to fix the house and [for] other necessities,” she says.

Pope traveled around the country, interviewing three different microcredit programs and observing the effects of International Rice Research Institute community programs.

“I spent a lot of time learning about Filipino culture and intercultural communication — things you don’t really get in Iowa,” Pope says. In addition to her time in the Philippines, Pope also spent a year studying abroad in Taiwan.

“You do a different kind of growing when you study abroad,” Pope says.

“The internship changed the course of my plans. I was planning to be an architecture major, then I got this internship and realized that I wanted to put my energies into helping people in the international community.”