The World Food Prize Recap!

The Iowa Action Recaps the World Food Prize, one of the most prominent events in Agriculture and one of the Action Corp's most important and influential events!  For more on the Iowa Action Corps and the World Food Prize, visit their blog here.

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On Sunday, October 14th, we started “World Food Prize Week” with a Des Moines Area Sisters on the Planet potluck. We were able to hear from the 2012 Female Food Hero Susan Godwin fromNigeria about the challenges she and her community has overcome such as changing market demand for products, low prices offered by middlemen buyers, and weak institutional support for smallholder farmers.

Tuesday, October 16th, was the kickoff of the Iowa Hunger Summit. Howard G. Buffet (yes, that Buffet!) was the keynote speaker and spoke to a room of 700 about the fight against world hunger. He said, “The solution is not setting goals and campaigns, the solution is changing our mindsets…When I started, I thought if we could produce more, we could feed more people. I was wrong.”


Wednesday, October 17th was the kickoff of the 2012 Borlaug Dialogue at the Downtown Des Moines Marriott. For three days (well, two and a half), leaders, panelists, and other stakeholders gathered to discuss the variety of ways that partnerships lead to food security and how to set an agenda that feeds the world. Oxfam America hosted a GROW luncheon and we, the Iowa Action Corps, had a great dinner with the Oxfam staff. We spent the day tabling, asking folks to sign-on to our World Food Day Dinners, and sharing a “tea time”.



Thursday, October 18th was another day of the 2012 Borlaug Dialogue and the evening saw the Laureate Award Ceremony at the Iowa State Capitol Building. Watch the recorded version here. Great speeches all around! We were excited to have such honored guests (like the U.N.Secretary General) in Iowa!

Friday, October 19th we traveled to Marshalltown Community College and visited their Rural Entrepreneurship Incubator (REI) and student gardens on campus. We heard about “Harvest from the Heart of Iowa” – an initiative to bring local producers and distributors of Central Iowa together as a resource for the community. That evening, we traveled back to Des Moines to experience the Global Youth Institute’s Oxfam America Hunger Banquet. 300 students from all over the country (and others) gathered to experience our world’s food security problem.

Saturday, October 20th saw the departure of our beloved Action Corps visitors and Oxfam staff. We spoke with many visitors at our table at the Downtown Farmers Market and had a chance to share the GROW Method with them. Farmers markets are so much fun and a great way to show people first-hand how their purchases benefit small farmers. We had a sample platter with fair trade chocolates and locally-grown and chemical free sweet peppers, spinach, and apples.

Whew! Can you really be exhausted and rejuvenated at the same time? (The answer is yes!) So many thanks to our fabulous volunteers for their time and energy over the long week and we have many exciting things coming up for our month of November! Hope you can join us! If you haven't signed our pledge and would like to get involved, email us here. Don't be shy - we'd love to have your support.

Oxfam Action Corps at the Prize!

Heisman Trophy or World Food Prize?

Entry #1 in a 3-part series on World Food Day from the Iowa Action Corps. Check out Iowa's blog for more pictures and stories from the World Food Prize and the World Food Festival!

In my opinion, the World Food Prize (WFP) is to food as the Heisman Trophy is to collegiate football. Where the Heisman Trophy is awarded to the most outstanding college football player whose “performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence”, the WFP is awarded to an individual whose contribution (also see: performance) has advanced human development in improving (also see: pursuit) the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world (also see: excellent).

I couldn't find a picture of a Quaterback
throwing an ear of corn, so just
imagine the football in this trophy is
actually a watermelon :-)

Before we delve too far into what the WFP is today, let’s take a time-out and learn about where it started: a scientist growing wheat.

In 1944, Dr. Norman E. Borlaug participated in the Rockefeller Foundation's pioneering technical assistance program in Mexico, where he was a research scientist in charge of wheat improvement. For over sixteen years, he worked to solve a series of wheat production problems that were limiting wheat cultivation in Mexico and to help train a whole generation of young Mexican scientists.

The work in Mexico not only had a profound impact on Dr. Borlaug's life and philosophy of agriculture research and development, but also on agricultural production, first in Mexico and later in many parts of the world. It was on the research stations and farmers' fields of Mexico that Dr. Borlaug scored touchdowns by growing wheat varieties with high disease resistance, broad adaptation to growing conditions, and exceedingly high yields.

These new wheat varieties and improved crop management practices transformed agricultural production in Mexico during the 1940's and 1950's and later in Asia and Latin America, sparking what today is known as the "Green Revolution." Because of his achievements to prevent hunger globally, it is said that Dr. Borlaug has "saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived."

Dr. Borlaug, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, envisioned a prize that would honor those who have made significant and measurable contributions to improving the world's food supply. Beyond recognizing these people for their accomplishments, Borlaug saw “The Prize” as a means of inspiring others. And thus, the World Food Prize was born.

There’s no telling if Dr. Borlaug would have won a Heisman Trophy had he made different career choices, but it can be safely said that this most-valuable player continues to lend his spirit for food justice in the years after his death (a “passing” football/death reference would have been in rather poor taste, sorry!).

Stay tuned for more!

Highlight: World Food Fest in Iowa!

Check out the latest stats from the Iowa Action Corps!  This post, from their blog on 9/27/12 shows just what an impact the Action Corps can make at one all-star event!

By The Numbers

The 8th U.S. Cellular World Food Festival "By The Numbers"

Number of planning meetings before the festival: 3

Number of hours spent making the map: 6

Number of food vendors: 39

Number of food plates drawn by children: 100+
Number of banana costumes: 1

Number of bruised thumbs: 2 (low accuracy with a hammer)

Number of days in the East Village: 3
Number of attendees: 75,000 (approximate)
Number of recorded volunteer hours: 150
Number of minutes on the DVD tribute slideshow: 25

And…drum roll, please…


Number of petition signatures: 1,050

Volunteers Brittney and Aaron showcase

our Oxfam booth!

We really couldn’t be more impressed with how receptive festival-goers were with Oxfam’s GROW campaign. Check out the pictures below (and more on our Facebook page) for how beautiful our booth looked with all of the plates of food that children were drawing. So many thanks to our volunteers and to everyone who stopped when we said, “Have you heard of Oxfam?”


  

Children were asked to make plates of food
for a child that didn't have enough to eat.

 
Stay tuned for our Des Moines GROW Method Binder, which will be uploaded with next week’s blog post. After that, we start a 3-part series of blog posts leading up to the World Food Prize here in Des Moines and a celebration of World Food Day.

Des Moines Urges - Decrease Your "Foodprint"!

Down in the dumps about American food waste? So are the Iowa Action Corps volunteers and the Natural Resources Defense Council. A new report demonstrates exactly where this waste is all coming from - and just how much good could be done by wasting less. Read this great post urging you to waste less and go GROW by the Iowa Action Corps!

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise. You wander into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and there they are: moldy strawberries, wilting lettuce, and an array of weeks-old leftovers that you either forgot about or were too busy to eat. "Oh yeah! I WAS going to eat that..."

Let's face the ugly truth: As Americans, we're quite wasteful. A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council  (Motto: "The Earth's Best Defense") puts a stunning number on the wastefulness, too...40%. But they don't stop there. Their report examines every stage from Farm to Fork to Landfill and all those steps in between to provide a truly comprehensive look at where the inefficiencies exist in our food system that result in such a mind-blowing number.

Now, you might think that mega-farms or corporations are to blame for the majority of the 40%. Yes, they are responsible for a share of it...but it's actually us - the individuals and families making food purchases who contribute the largest share of food waste. Yuk! In fact, if 15% of the food waste was recovered and put on the table for hungry families, we could feed 25 million people! That makes a huge difference considering here in the U.S., 1 in 6 people are food insecure.

So, it only makes sense that Oxfam's GROW Method is the next logical step in the process. One of the key components is reducing food waste so that we, as individuals, can make a difference. Between the Pinterest page and Facebook app, you can learn (and contribute!) new ways of thinking about your food and how to lower your "foodprint".

For a one-pager version of the NRDC report highlights, click here.

The average American household throws 
out 20 pounds of food per person per month!

For the complete NRDC 25+ page report "Wasted", click here.

Iowa Action Corps Goes Local

This post "GROWing a Better Tomorrow" was featured in the Iowa Action Corps blog on Tuesday, July 3rd.  Read on to take a look at how Iowa is supporting local farmers!

Crystal used the tiller to prepare the
soil for beans. Check out
that backdrop of
corn nearly ready for harvesting!

On June 26^th, Oxfam volunteers Crystal and Mindi (as well as co-organizers Amy Luebbert and Lance Massey) headed to St. Timothy’s Faith and Grace Garden in West Des Moines for a little community garden action. The 40,000 square foot garden supports local food pantries, community centers, as well as a family violence shelter by producing tons of fresh produce annually. So far in 2012, over 1500 pounds has been grown and harvested. With the love, care, and sweat equity put into this garden by so many volunteers, tonight fewer people have to go to bed hungry. 

That’s how you GROW a better tomorrow!

Mindi place the pole beans in the trenches
on either side of the supporting fence. We
covered the beans up a little later. It'll
be fun to see how much they've grown
next time we go out to the garden!

Oxfam Iowa Volunteers: Mindi, Crystal, Lance, and Amy

Have a great GROW friendly activity happening in your city? Have a stand-out blog you'd like to share? Send it on to actioncorps@oxfamamerica.org and see your post here!