The Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security, awarded in partnership with Agropolis Fondation, 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.
The winner will receive an unrestricted US$75,000 grant for the scaling up of proven research. Entries are judged by an independent jury of experts and awarded in conjunction with the Agropolis Louis Malassis International Scientific Prizes for Agriculture and Food.
The 2019 Prize has been awarded to pioneering landscape mapping that’s re-imagining subsistence farming.
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.
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 first 10 tonnes of certified grains have now been produced by two Senegalese farming communities - one being a female cooperative of 50 women.
Once fully scaled, the goal to produce 1,000 tonnes of seeds in the next three years. You can also read his plea to the COP 23 Committee on the Huffington Post.
In 2015, the inaugural prize was awarded to a research team based at Cornell University who are revolutionising the way rice is grown. Read Professor Uphoff’s blog on the invisible life in soil systems.
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