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Renowned agronomist and World Food Prize Laureate Gurdev Khush was impressed. He toured the STEM Academy facilities at Hoover High School last week, nodding and smiling at what they offered.
Khush was in Des Moines Oct. 22 for the annual World Food Prize festivities, along with fellow laureates honored for their efforts to end world hunger. Khush was named a laureate in 1996.
When he dropped in on first-year teacher Tiffany Roby’s class at Hoover, Khush seemed surprised to learn her students are in the process of submitting formal research proposals and that some of them have been rejected. It sounded pretty collegiate.
He asked whether any Hoover students are involved with the World Food Prize Foundation’s Borlaug-Ruan Youth Institute. Later he met senior Corbin Faidley, who, under the guidance of teacher Mike Blair, has prepared a paper on food security in Niger to present as part of the program. Student presentations could lead to a prestigious Borlaug-Ruan international internship, which provides high school students an all-expenses-paid, eight-week hands-on experience working with world-renowned scientists and policymakers at leading research centers around the globe.
Each year exceptional high school students are selected to participate in the three-day Global Youth Institute that’s included in the World Food Prize schedule of events.
Selected students and their teacher mentors interact and discuss agricultural issues with international experts like Khush, who was awarded the World Food Prize for his achievements in greatly increasing the global supply of rice during a time of exponential population growth. Like Iowa’s own famed grain geneticist Norman Borlaug, Khush is considered one of the giants of the Green Revolution.
Following his tour, Khush spoke to a cohort of STEM students in the Hoover auditorium. He recited statistics and facts that framed the scope of hunger around the globe: “Only 3 percent of the world’s water supply is freshwater … every one degree increase in average overnight low temperatures during growing seasons reduces crop yield by 10 percent … 45 percent of child deaths globally are due to malnutrition,” he said.
But the most directly relevant things he had to say to the high school students concerned not the global to-do list, but his own upbringing and education. Khush grew up in a small village in Punjab, India.
“We didn’t have desks or electricity in some of the schools when I was a boy,” he said. “But we had the desire.”
He encouraged the students to take advantage of the opportunities before them, saying of the overhauled STEM classroom that he has “not seen facilities like these for students your age in the United States.”
Having done so much to fill so many empty stomachs, Khush now seeks to instill a hunger in young people — one for knowledge and solutions.