The following is an edited excerpt.
As governments, food aid organizations and other groups are thinking big in their efforts to fight global hunger, the winners of this year’s World Food Prize had a major impact by focusing their attention on thinking small.
The World Food Prize on Wednesday announced Marc Van Montagu of Belgium, and Mary-Dell Chilton and Robert Fraley of the United States, as winners of the prestigious award in 2013 for their research on plant biotechnology.
For decades, the scientists toiled independently on ways to put foreign genes into a plant’s DNA that had favorable traits such as improved yields and a resistance to insects and diseases. The World Food Prize said the laureates’ findings are expected to play an even bigger role in the face of a growing global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and an increasingly unpredictable climate.
Read the complete story here: World Food Prize goes for work on biotech crops
