Aaaaaaand The 2013 World Food Prize Goes To: Monsanto & Syngenta

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The event was one of the opening-day highlights of this year’s Borlaug Dialogue, the World Food Prize’s annual symposium, named for Iowan Norman Borlaug, who is considered by many the father of the Green Revolution and founded the prize a decade and a half after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his efforts fighting famine in the developing world.

Often hailed as the Nobel Prize of food, the World Food Prize has received as much attention this week for its ties to industrial agriculture and genetically modified (GM) crops as it has for honoring those who feed the world’s poor. The prize has been a lightning rod for international criticism since June, when it announced as one of its laureates Robert Fraley, an executive at the biotech corporation Monsanto, which has been at the center of a number of controversies over GM crops. Fraley shared the honor with Syngenta scientist Mary-Bell Chilton and Plant Genetic Systems co-founder Marc Van Montagu, fellow pioneers in the development of high-yield GM crops resistant to disease, pests and harsh climates.

The prize’s annual symposium arrived on the heels of global protests last Saturday against Monsanto’s corporate-farming practices and use of GM crops. A campaign called Occupy the World Food Prize participated in the march to kick off a week of demonstrations against the prize in Des Moines.

“To me, from a PR perspective, it was a bad decision to have all three of the recipients of the award from the corporate world,” said Frederick Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames. “They should have expected this was going to raise serious questions about whether or not they were giving the impression that the solution (to fighting hunger) is just intensifying industrial agriculture.”

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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/18/critics-assail-monstanoaswinnerofworldfoodprize.html