Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, credited with saving a billion people from starvation through the Green Revolution of high-yielding grain crops, created the World Food Prize to recognize stellar achievements in improving the world’s food supply. Sixth-generation seedsman Simon Groot is the 2019 winner of the $250,000 prize, sometimes called the Nobel of agriculture, officials announced on Monday.
A Dutchman, Groot co-founded East-West Seed, which developed disease-resistant and better-yielding hybrid vegetable varieties for smallholder farmers, many of them women, in the tropics. “As use of his seeds spread…farmers’ daily lives were uplifted and consumers benefitted from greater access to nutritious vegetables. Mr. Groot in effect developed a stunningly impactful global network of seed producers who are transforming the lives of 20 million farmers every year,” said Kenneth Quinn, head of the food prize foundation.
Groot is the first native of the Netherlands and first vegetable seedsman to win the food prize. It will be awarded formally on Oct. 17, as part of the Borlaug symposium in Des Moines, Iowa. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took part in the announcement, in the ceremonial Franklin Room of the State Department, of Groot as the 2019 laureate.
“Already, the recipients of the World Food Prize have fed billions of people,” said Pompeo, but more than 800 million people face hunger around the world. “Don’t get discouraged. That’s just the opposite of the message today. It’s a reason to keep on fighting, keep up this good work, continue this effort that we’re in today. I’m confident with the continued efforts of Simon Groot and many of you in this room, we can solve the crisis the way it needs to be solved: For good.”
Besides offering the first locally developed and better-quality hybrid seeds, East-West Seed worked with philanthropic groups to set up a program to train tends of thousands of farmers annually in good practices for vegetable production. As a result, says the food prize foundation, farmers’ incomes doubled or tripled and local shoppers saw greater availability of nutritious vegetables.
“The ultimate recognition is for the millions of smallholder farmers that stepped up farming from a way of living to building a business,” said Groot, who said he was excited and gratified by the food prize. “Now it is the turn for tropical Africa where again quality vegetable seeds combined with major farmer knowledge transfer programs can create sustainable income for the next generation of African farmers.”
At age 47, Groot left a Dutch seed company in 1982 to move to the Philippines, where he and the late Benito Domingo launched East-West Seed. The company now reaches 60 countries around the world. The first focus of East-West’s breeding program was the bitter gourd, a nutritious Asian vegetable little known in the West. The first successful hybrid was Jade Star.
“Jade Star was the Philippines’ first hybrid vegetable variety, created in the Philippines for Filipino farmers and for Philippine growing conditions and markets. In fact, it was the first locally developed commercial vegetable hybrid in all of Southeast Asia,” says the food prize foundation’s biography of Groot. “New varieties soon followed of other vegetables, including kangkong, yardlong bean, sweet corn, tropical pumpkin, ridge gourd, wax gourd, cucumber, tomato, watermelon, eggplant, onion and many more.” Jade Star was developed in 1984, the same year that East-West opened a vegetable breeding farm in Thailand. In 1990, the company began work at three research farms in Indonesia, to breed crops for highland, lowland and mid-altitude farms.
To see the World Food Prize Foundation page on Groot and the food prize, click here.