The World Food Prize announced that the winner of its award for agricultural leaders under 40 goes to Dr. Bram Govaerts, a native of Belgium now working from Mexico, for his work developing leading-edge, sustainable programs that are transforming subsistence agriculture and unsustainable farming systems in Mexico and other regions of the world into productive and sustainable production operations. Dr. Govaerts’ collaborative work with farmers has made it possible for smallholders in Mexico and other developing countries to escape hunger and poverty and improve their livelihoods.
Dr. Govaerts will be formally presented with the $10,000 “Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation” on October 15, 2014, in Des Moines, Iowa, as part of this year’s World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue international symposium.
Dr. Govaerts, 35, currently serves as Associate Director of the Global Conservation Agricultural Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). The announcement of his selection was made by World Food Prize President Ambassador Kenneth Quinn at the USAID Frontiers in Development Forum on September 18 in Washington, D.C.
In developing his vision to help poor farmers increase food production from their existing farmland, Dr. Govaerts was inspired by the great agricultural scientist and World Food Prize Founder Norman Borlaug’s credo: “Take It to the Farmer.” To that end, Dr. Govaerts was instrumental in framing the Mexican government’s major initiative known as the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro), and, in June 2014, he assumed leadership of the entire program, with responsibility for coordinating the evolution of related projects in Latin America.
