DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The son of a Nigerian farm laborer who rose out of poverty to earn graduate degrees in agricultural economics and spent his career improving the availability of seed, fertilizer and financing for African farmers is the winner of this year’s World Food Prize.

 

Akinwumi Adesina, president of African Development Bank (ADB), says the future of global food security relies on making farming in Africa a profitable business and developing local food processing that adds value to agricultural products to help move farmers out of poverty.

“I believe that what Africa does with agriculture and how it does it is not only important for Africa, but it’s important for how we’re going to feed the world by 2050, because 65 percent of all the uncultivated arable land left in the world is in Africa,” he said.

World Food Prize President Kenneth Quinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, said those goals are one reason the organization’s board chose Adesina this year for the $250,000 prize.

Adesina, 57, works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where the ADB is based. He will receive the prize in a ceremony Oct. 19 at the Iowa Capitol. The award recognizes several of Adesina’s accomplishments, including:

•Negotiating a partnership between commercial banks and development organizations to provide loans to tens of thousands of farmers and agribusinesses in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana and Mozambique.

•Creating programs to make Nigeria self-sufficient in rice production and to help cassava become a major cash crop while serving as Nigeria’s minister of agriculture from 2011 to 2015.

•Helping to end more than 40 years of corruption in the fertilizer and seed sectors in Nigeria by launching an electronic wallet system that directly provides farmers with vouchers redeemable for inputs using mobile phones. The resulting increased farm yields have led to the improvement of food security for 40 million people in rural farm households.

Adesina earned agriculture economics degrees – both a master’s and a doctorate – from Purdue University.