Olam International has partnered with Agropolis Fondation, to hunt for ground- breaking scientific research that can deliver transformational impacts within global agriculture and win a $75,000 grant to support development and implementation.
Unlike other research awards, the Olam prize for innovation in food security requires clear evidence of potential short-term impact on food availability, affordability, adequacy, and accessibility. The fourth edition of the biennial prize follows the recent warning from the UN World Food Programme that the Covid-19 pandemic will double the number of people suffering acute hunger by the end of 2020, bringing food security firmly into the world’s spotlight.
Sunny Verghese, co-founder and group CEO at Olam said: “At a time when the world faces a potential rise in food insecurity from the coronavirus crisis, with vulnerable parts of the developing world, particularly in Africa, most at risk, the new scientific insights and techniques being developed by research teams around the world are more significant than ever. The Olam prize aims to support breakthrough innovations so that together we can re- imagine agriculture for greater food security.”
The winner of the previous prize was a pioneering mapping approach that is reimagining subsistence farming in Ethiopia, co-ordinated by Tomaso Ceccarelli of Wageningen Environmental Research and Elias Eyasu Fantahun of Addis Ababa University. Innovation Mapping for Food Security (IM4FS), is supporting Ethiopia’s REALISE programme to give smallholder farmers a ‘best fit’ for what to grow, where and how, with the goal of improving productivity in food insecure areas.
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Commenting on what the funding has meant to the implementation of their research, Ceccarelli said: “The funding from the Olam Prize has allowed us to start scaling up our approach and shift our focus from areas of high potential agriculture, to the food insecure and drought prone regions of Ethiopia. Specifically, the funding is being applied to four key areas – engaging local and regional planners, in-situ data collection on bio-physical and socio-economic conditions, developing the GIS-based tool behind IM4FS, and application of site-specific crop recommendations based on the research fed into and information generated by the tool.”
“With the unexpected outbreak of Covid-19, we’re also reviewing with our partners how IM4FS can support more immediate and urgent food security needs for farmers amid the pandemic. This would include planning efficient seed, fertilizer and other input distribution to farmers based on needs assessments,” he said.
Meanwhile, since receipt of the 2017 prize funding, the heat-tolerant wheat varieties developed by Filippo Bassi of ICARDA, are now well-established in Senegal and Mauritania and have been successfully cultivated for the first time by farmers in Benin, Togo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and the Republic of the Gambia.
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