Senior participates in World Food Prize conference

Noelle Konieczny/Staff Writer

Senior Cadi Trask recently participated in the World Food Prize, a conference that recognizes the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity and availability of food around the world.

The World Food Prize Youth Institute hosts a three-day Global Youth Institute in Des Moines, in which over 100 exceptional high school students from across the globe participate. The Institute brings in high school students at the end of the World Food Prize week, and they present papers that they’ve written.

“World Food Prize is an excellent, real world application of stuff that you’re learning, and it gives students with a passion an opportunity to contribute or see where they fit in,” science teacher Debbie Paulsen said

For their paper, each student picks a country or area and then one specific group of people to alleviate hunger from. Some of the processes in which they alleviate hunger can be through political work, food and agriculture research, science and technology research, manufacturing or nutrition.

“My paper was about Kenya. I decided to single out the orphans in particular. I decided to have NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) give money to have a flock of chickens given to an orphanage.The orphans could help take care of the chickens so that they could learn the trade of taking care of livestock, and then when the orphans leave, instead of leaving the orphanage and going right back into hunger because they have nothing, they could instead have chickens and have a way to know how to raise them so at least that generation of hunger can be wiped out,” Trask said.

Trask said she picked Kenya because she’s been there, so she could visualize the country and the orphanages better, because there’s a lot of research involved. She originally thought of goats, but she came up with chickens because they would be less expensive and easier to take care of.

The conference in Des Moines was held Oct. 14-16 and featured speakers talking about the most pressing world hunger issues and the actions being taken to combat them.

“One of the biggest ideas presented at the conference is that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. It’s just a distribution problem, and that is so sad. It’s a tragedy,” Trask said.

“It was really encouraging to see that people were caring about it, and to meet with those people who believed in us,” Trask said.

The World Food Prize was founded by Iowa native, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Norman E. Borlaug in 1986. Born in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for a lifetime of work to feed a hungry world.

In Mexico, Borlaug developed high-yielding wheat varieties for which many people credit him with saving the lives of over a billion people worldwide from starvation; the most lives ever saved by one person.