Adesina Wins World Food Prize

Akinwumi A. Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank, said he is inspired by a commitment to transform African agriculture into a means for lifting millions out of poverty and is proud his work has been recognized with Monday’s announcement that he is the winner of the 2017 World Food Prize.

Adesina, 57, will receive the $250,000 award administered by the Des Moines-based World Food Prize Foundation at a ceremony at the state Capitol in October.

The prize was founded by Norman E. Borlaug, a native of northeast Iowa who was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work feeding the world through the scientific advancements of the Green Revolution.

In a telephone interview Friday from his office in Ibadan, Nigeria, Adesina said he was “greatly honored and excited to be given this prize for the work I have done over the years.”

He said it makes him “more inspired and motivated to do even more until we free Africa of hunger.”

Adesina, who knew the late Borlaug when they both worked with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, said he was “a great mentor of mine and an inspiration to so, so many.

He was a man who fed a billion people. Just think about it.”

The prize has been awarded since 1987 and has gone to scientists, social engineers, politicians, international food program administrators and others.

Sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture, its 1994 winner, Bangladeshi microfinance advocate Muhammad Yunus, went on the win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Adesina said he looks forward to coming to Des Moines with a message about using agriculture as a business to create wealth and end poverty.

“Agriculture is not a way of life. It’s not a social sector. It’s a business,” he said.

He said his work at the African Development Bank is to help farmers rise to the top of the value chain by industrializing agriculture.  He said Africa is importing food and should do more to export raw materials like cotton and cocoa.

According to the foundation’s statement, Adesina was born in Ebadam, Nigeria, attended village schools and lived among smallholder farmers. His father Roland predicted that his early exposure to rural poverty would prove useful when he rose to a position of influence, and it has.

In his remarks in October, Adesina said he will speak of his background — “I know poverty,” he said — and of the efforts he hopes will be made to “unlock the potential” of the continent.

He said he has visited Des Moines several times and has a great respect for Iowa farmers.

Named Nigeria’s agriculture minister in 2011, Adesina is credited with developing the Electronic Wallet, or E-Wallet, that allowed farmers to use electronic vouchers by mobile phone to deal with seed and fertilizer vendors directly, cutting out sometimes corrupt middlemen, according to the foundation’s statement announcing his selection.

The system dramatically raised production of cassava, rice, sorghum, maize and cotton while at the same time raising farmers’ income.

Over time, such financial institutions as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the European Union helped scale up the concept in other African countries. Adesina was instrumental in organizing a 2006 African Fertilizer Summit in Abuja, Nigeria, that resulted in better yields across the continent. Borlaug, at age 92, spoke at the summit.

In Friday’s interview, Adesina recalled Borlaug banging his fist on the table and saying “I want to be alive to see the Green Revolution” in Africa.

That has begun to happen. Adesina helped the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, get off the ground with the help of the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, and with former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as its chairman.

Adesina served as AGRA’s vice president for policy. The alliance’s work helped persuade more financial institutions to advance credit to agricultural enterprises, including small farm operations.

As president of the African Development Bank since May 2015, Adesina has worked to assure that Africa can be self-sufficient in food production while also addressing malnutrition and the kind of stunting of growth that comes from childhood hunger during early development.

He said the importance of dealing with stunting will be something to which he hopes to call to wider global attention.

Adasina studied agricultural economics at the University of Ife in Nigeria, where he met his wife, Grace, whose father had served as agriculture minister under Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Adesina went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in agricultural economics at Purdue University in Indiana.

Post-doctoral work with the Rockefeller Foundation from 1998 to 2008 sent him to study crop research in semi-arid parts of India and later in Mali. He also opened the foundation’s Southern Africa Regional Office in Zimbabwe where he served as director.

Adesina has received a host of international awards, including the YARA Prize in Norway in 2007 and the Borlaug Council for Agricultural Science and Technology Award in 2010 for his work.

Also in 2010, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon named him one of 17 leaders in the effort to achieve the world body’s Millennium Development Goals. He was Forbes’ Africa Person of the Year in 2013.