Twelve World Food Prize Laureates, in Order of the Prize Year

Nevin Scrimshaw received the World Food Prize in 1991 for developing nutritional supplements to relieve protein, iodine and iron deficiencies in the developing world. He also founded the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama, so his work was institution building as much as laboratory science.

Henry Beachell shared the 1996 prize with Gurdev Khush, who counted him as a mentor. After joining the International Rice Research Institute in 1963 he bred the high yielding rice variety IR8, released in 1966, which raised Asian rice yields from one or two tons per hectare to four or five and became a central achievement of the Green Revolution.

Gurdev Khush received the 1996 prize alongside his mentor Henry Beachell for enlarging and improving the global supply of rice during a period of rapid population growth. The atlas records his contribution as high yielding semi-dwarf rice breeding at the International Rice Research Institute during the Green Revolution.

Evangelina Villegas, a Mexican cereal biochemist, shared the 2000 prize for quality protein maize, developed with her colleague Surinder Vasal at CIMMYT. She was the first woman to receive the World Food Prize.

Surinder Vasal, an Indian geneticist and plant breeder, worked with Evangelina Villegas for 35 years at CIMMYT in Mexico on a maize with more usable protein. Quality protein maize is now used in China, Mexico, parts of Central America and Africa, and he and Villegas were jointly awarded the prize in 2000.

Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a Danish economist, received the prize in 2001 and is the first stop here whose work was policy research rather than breeding. As Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute from 1992 to 2002 he directed research that helped several governments reform food subsidy programs.

Gebisa Ejeta, an Ethiopian American plant breeder at Purdue University, won the 2009 prize for sorghum. He developed the first high yielding, drought tolerant sorghum hybrids resistant to Striga, a parasitic weed that affects a large share of Africa's arable land. He grew up in a one-room thatched hut in rural west-central Ethiopia.

Maria Andrade, a Cape Verdean food scientist who has researched sweet potato in Mozambique since 1996, shared the 2016 prize for the biofortified orange fleshed sweet potato. A donor described her program in Mozambique as the calling card for biofortification work in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Robert Mwanga, a plant breeder from Uganda, was one of the four 2016 laureates. The sweet potato breeding program he led released 20 orange fleshed varieties between 1995 and 2013, the varieties that carry vitamin A to the people who eat them.

Jan Low, an American food scientist at the International Potato Center, shared the 2016 prize. Her 2005 study among poor African communities, supported by USAID, the Micronutrient Initiative and the Rockefeller Foundation, demonstrated the effect of eating orange fleshed sweet potato on vitamin A deficiency.

Howarth Bouis, an American economist, is the fourth 2016 laureate. He created HarvestPlus within the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2003 as a global effort to improve nutrition and public health through crop biofortification, aimed at the micronutrient malnutrition known as hidden hunger.

Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted of Trinidad and Tobago and Denmark was announced as the 2021 laureate and is the first woman of Asian ancestry to receive the prize. She was the first to discover the high levels of essential micronutrients and fatty acids in the small native fish species commonly eaten in Bangladesh.