Shakuntala Thilsted, who spent years proving, and then promoting, the value of fish grown in backyard ponds to improve the diets of poor families in Asia and Africa, was the 2021 winner of the $250,000 World Food, the sponsoring foundation announced on Tuesday. In Bangladesh, her pond-polyculture approach supports 18 million people and turned the nation into the world’s fifth-largest aquaculture producer.
Thilsted was the first to establish that many of the small fish species commonly eaten in Southeast Asia are an important source of micronutrients and fatty acids and improve the absorption of nutrients from plant-based foods, said the World Food Prize Foundation. “This breakthrough has helped prioritize increases in fish consumption and production, transforming the diets and incomes of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Much of her success in expanding small-scale aquaculture was due to development of pond polyculture systems, in which small and larger fish species are farmed together in irrigated rice fields and bodies of water. Contrary to the belief of farmers, the fish did not compete for food, so growing the species together increased the total production of fish by as much as five times. Along with pond polyculture, Thilsted encouraged cultivation of sweet potatoes and other vegetables to diversity farm income and diets. And she drew on local recipes to develop dried-fish products such as fish chutney and fish powder for consumption at home and for sale.
“Fish and aquatic foods offer life-changing opportunities for millions of vulnerable women, children and men to be healthy and well-nourished,” said Thilsted, 71, a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She was the first woman ever hired by the Ministry of Agriculture to work on the island of Tobago. Aquatic foods offer a path “to produce sufficient food supply without increasing carbon emissions while reducing ecosystem stress and habitat loss,” she said.
Thilsted is the seventh woman and first woman of Asian ancestry to win the Food Prize, which was established in 1986 by Nobel Peace laureate Norman Borlaug. The prize usually is awarded formally as part of a week-long conference on food and agriculture in October in Des Moines.
Working with a partner, Abdul Wahab, from the Bangladesh Agricultural University, Thilsted led researchers in the 1990s in development of the pond polyculture system. The system was so successful the Bangladesh government made it a key element of its national investment plan. The pond polyculture system helps nourish millions of people from Southeast Asia to Zambia and Malawi in Africa.
The career in fish nutrition, Thilsted said, was prompted by her work in the late 1980s in a hospital in Bangladesh that treated severely malnourished children. She wanted to prevent malnutrition rather than treating it. A supervisor suggested she work to ensure children ate fish as a way to improve their diets.
To read the World Food Prize Foundation biography of Thilsted, click here.