The 2009 World Food Prize will be awarded to Dr. Gebisa Ejeta of Ethiopia, whose sorghum hybrids resistant to drought and the devastating Striga weed have dramatically increased the production and availability of one of the world’s five principal grains and enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Ejeta as a grad student at Purdue in 1974
the hybrids out-yielded traditional sorghum varieties by 50 to 100 percent
Another drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid, NAD-1, was developed for conditions in Niger by Dr. Ejeta
This cultivar has had yields 4 or 5 times the national sorghum average
Dr. Ejeta’s next breakthrough came in the 1990s
he deadly parasitic weed Striga, known commonly as witchweed, which devastates yields of crops including maize, rice, pearl millet, sugarcane, and sorghum, thus severely limiting food availability
Striga plagues 40% of arable savannah land and over 100 million people in Africa
clipped from: www.worldfoodprize.org 
