By Andualem Sisay, AfricaNews reporter in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Ethiopian researcher, Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, has won 250.000 US dollar for the 2009 World Food Prize.
The prestigious Prize will be awarded to Dr. Gebisa Ejeta who won the prize for his agricultural research of sorghum (durra) hybrids. His hybrids were tested by farmers and proved to be drought resistant.
His research also dramatically increased the production of sorghum yields to more than 150 percent.
He will receive the money on October 15 at the Iowa State Capitol i the US.
The World Food Prize is the foremost international award recognizing – without regard to race, religion, nationality, or political beliefs – the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.
Dr. Gebisas sorghum hybrids designed to be tolerant to the deadly parasitic weed Striga have dramatically increased the production and availability of one of the worlds five principal grains and enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
With the local importance of sorghum in the human diet (made into breads, porridges, and beverages), and the vast potential of dry land agriculture in Sudan, Dr. Gebisas drought-tolerant hybrids brought dramatic gains in crop productivity and also catalyzed the initiation of a commercial sorghum seed industry in Sudan.
His Hageen Dura-1, as the hybrid was named, was released in 1983 following field trials in which the hybrids out-yielded traditional sorghum varieties by 50 to 100 percent.
Its superior grain qualities contributed to its rapid spread and wide acceptance by farmers, who found that yields increased to more than 150 percent greater than local sorghum, far surpassing the percentage gain in the trials.
By 1999, one million acres of Hageen Dura-1 had been harvested by hundreds of thousands of Sudanese farmers, and millions of Sudanese had been fed with grain produced by Hageen Dura-1.
Another drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid, NAD-1, was developed for conditions in Niger by Dr. Gebisa and one of his graduate students at Purdue University in 1992. This cultivar has had yields 4 or 5 times the national sorghum average.
Using some of the drought-tolerant germplasm from the hybrids in Niger and Sudan, Dr. Gebisa also developed elite sorghum inbred lines for the US sorghum hybrid industry.
He has released over 70 parental lines for the US seed industrys use in commercial sorghum hybrids in both their domestic and international markets.
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Kilde: Africanews
