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.
…

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.

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