Increasing sustainable food production is crucial to nourish the more than 820 million people who regularly go to bed hungry and the additional 2 billion people the world will have by 2050. The Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security aims to support scientific research that can deliver transformational impacts within global agriculture.
Awarded in partnership with Agropolis Fondation, the Prize recognises an innovative scientific research project for its potential impact on the availability, accessibility, affordability and adequacy of food, in line with UN SDG#2: End Hunger.
Entries for the 2021 Prize are now open and the winner will receive an unrestricted US$75,000 grant for the scaling up of proven research. Applications are welcomed from academic or research institutions, civil societies and the private sector, and can focus on any region, environment, crop or part of the agricultural supply chain.
The deadline for applications has been extended to 15th March 2021 and will be judged by an independent jury of experts and awarded in conjunction with the Agropolis Louis Malassis International Scientific Prizes for Agriculture and Food.
Past winners
The 2019 Prize was awarded to a pioneering landscape mapping that’s re-imagining subsistence farming in Ethiopia.
Innovation Mapping for Food Security (IM4FS) – co-led by Dr Tomaso Ceccarelli of Wageningen University Research and Dr Elias Eyasu Fantahun of Addis Ababa University – recommends “best-fit” combinations of crops, farming practices, and environmental and socio-economic conditions, to optimise smallholder yields of staple crops in food insecure areas.
Applied at scale, it has the potential to transform productivity in countries like Ethiopia, hit by food insecurity.
The 2017 Prize went to Durum wheat breeder Dr Filippo Bassi of ICARDA for his development of a strain of heat-tolerant wheat, able to withstand the 40°C temperatures of sub-Saharan Africa.
Since receipt of the Prize funding, the new varieties have been well established in Senegal and Mauritania and successfully cultivated for the first time in Benin, Togo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and the Republic of the Gambia.
Female farmers along the Senegal River have been trained to become village-based seed enterprises. They have produced 100 tonnes of seeds to date with the goal of reaching 1,000 tonnes by 2022, with continued government support. You can also read his plea to the COP 23 Committee on the Huffington Post.
The inaugural Prize in 2015 was awarded to a research team based at Cornell University who are revolutionising the way rice is grown. Read Professor Uphoff’s In conversation with Professor Uphoff - The Olam 2015 Prize Winner.
