Five World Food Prize laureates will speak at CU on global hunger

Bertini

Jones

Pinstrup-Andersen

Sanchez

Scrimshaw

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Five World Food Prize laureates will use their expertise to address the issue of world hunger in a fall semester seminar series on campus as part of the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' (CALS) yearlong centennial celebration.

The seminars will be in Room G10 of the Biotechnology Building from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., and they are free and open to the public.

The first seminar, Sept. 23, "Accomplishments and Aspirations: Linking Agriculture, Nutrition and Health," features World Food Prize laureates Nevin Scrimshaw (1991), Catherine Bertini (2003) and Cornell Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen (2001).

Scrimshaw, a professor of nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent his career as a public health physician finding low-cost preventives for malnutrition. He used protein supplements for infants and young children and obtained universal iodation of salt in Latin America and elsewhere, substantially improving the lives of millions of people.

Bertini, the current United Nations undersecretary general for management, transformed the U.N. World Food Programme from a development assistance organization into the largest and most responsive global humanitarian relief group. It has delivered life-sustaining food aid to over 700 million people in more than 100 countries.

Pinstrup-Andersen, the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy in Cornell's Division of Nutritional Sciences, has heightened awareness among world leaders of the potential for a food-security crisis in the 21st century.

The second seminar, Oct. 20, "From Asia to Africa: New Rice for Africa -- Fighting Africa's War Against Poverty and Hunger," will feature 2004 World Food Prize laureate Monty Jones, the executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.

The final seminar, Nov. 11, "Recommendations of the U.N. Millennium Project Hunger Task Force to Achieve the Millennium Development Goal," features alumnus Pedro Sanchez '62, the 2002 World Food Prize laureate who is director of tropical agriculture at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

The seminar series is sponsored by CALS International Programs and the Division of Nutritional Sciences. For more information, contact June Losurdo at 255-7771.