Olam International, in partnership with Agropolis Fondation, is on the hunt for ground-breaking scientific research that can deliver transformational impacts within global agriculture and win a USD$75,000 grant to support development and implementation.
Unlike other research awards, the Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security requires clear evidence of potential short-term impact on food availability, affordability, adequacy, and accessibility. The fourth edition of the biennial Prize follows the recent warning from the UN World Food Programme that the COVID-19 pandemic will double the number of people suffering acute hunger by the end of 2020, bringing food security firmly into the world’s spotlight.
Sunny Verghese, Co-Founder and Group CEO at Olam said: “At a time when the world faces a potential rise in food insecurity from the coronavirus crisis, with vulnerable parts of the developing world, particularly in Africa, most at risk, the new scientific insights and techniques being developed by research teams around the world are more significant than ever. The Olam Prize aims to support breakthrough innovations so that together we can re-imagine agriculture for greater food security.”
The winner of the previous Prize was a pioneering mapping approach that is reimagining subsistence farming in Ethiopia, co-ordinated by Dr Tomaso Ceccarelli of Wageningen Environmental Research and Dr Elias Eyasu Fantahun of Addis Ababa University.