Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a citizen of Denmark, received the $250,000 World Food Prize for 2001 for his contribution to agricultural research and food policy. He was then the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (1992-2002) when he was selected for this prestigious award.

Under his leadership, IFPRI became the world’s leading think-tank on hunger issues, taking on numerous groundbreaking research projects, including: breeding staple crops for higher nutrition; improving the effectiveness of food for education efforts; and computer-modeling through IFPRI’s IMPACT computer system projections to determine the effects of government policies on child malnutrition and food security. IFPRI is a Future Harvest Center, which is funded through the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) based in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen also worked with Cornell University as director of the Food and Nutrition Policy Program and a professor of food economics. He also served as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee to the CGIAR; director of the Food Consumption and Nutrition Policy Program at IFPRI, an agricultural economist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, director of the Agro-Economic Division at the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) in the United States, and an associate professor of the Danish Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen. Currently, he is a senior research fellow in the Director General's Office of IFPRI.

In 1993, Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen launched the 2020 Vision Initiative. The effort alerted world leaders to potential food security crises in the 21st Century, thus helping to change the priorities of governments; halting the decline in donor support to agricultural research and development; and leading to the instigation of projects which have improved the lives of the world’s poorest citizens and reduced global poverty figures.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen is a member of several committees, including the Committee on Agricultural Biotechnology, Health, and the Environment under the National Research Council; the Working Committee on Biotechnology under the State Department's Advisory Council on International Economic Policy; and the World Health Policy Forum and its General Council. He is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Other awards he received include: Distinguished Alumnus of the Economics Institute of the University of Colorado; Distinguished Alumnus of Oklahoma State University; Outstanding Journal Article Award and a Ph.D. Thesis Award, both from the American Agricultural Economics Association; Charles A. Black Award for outstanding record of research and communication; and the Danish Agronomy Prize.

He also holds honorary doctors degrees from Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University in India, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, the University of Aberdeen, U.K, and the Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is honorary professor at the Tashkent State University in Uzbekistan and a Distinguished Professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen holds a B.S. in agricultural economics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University. He has written more than 300 books, articles, and papers.

Quote from Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen “The 2020 Vision is a vision of a world which by year 2020 will be free of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition and of a world where management of natural resources will be done sustainably. Can we reach this? Yes, we can. Will we? Depends on what we do between now and then. It is in our hands; it's in the hands of the people who can make the decisions to make it happen. It is a matter of priority, not a matter of whether it can be done or not.”  

http://www.worldfoodprize.org
http://www.ifpri.org/pinstrup
_wfp/pinstrup_wfp.htm

Copyright © 2006. CropBiotech Net.