Simon N. Groot

Simon Nanne Groot, born October 25, 1934, in Enkhuizen, Netherlands, and died July 6, 2025, was a Dutch agronomist from a sixth-generation family of crop seed cultivators who earned a degree in business economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 1982 he founded the seed company East West Seed with Benito Domingo, beginning operations in the Philippines and developing improved, disease-resistant vegetable cultivars aimed at smallholder farmers in impoverished regions, and the company went on to operate in more than sixty developing countries across Southeast Asia and Africa. He received the 2015 Mansholt Award for sustainable entrepreneurship and the 2019 World Food Prize, whose citation recognized his role in empowering millions of smallholder farmers and giving hundreds of millions of consumers greater access to nutritious vegetables.