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Re: عالم إثيوبى يفوز بجائزة الغذاء العالمى لأبحاثه فى الســودان فى تحسين وتحصين الذرة (Re: Abureesh)
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An Ethiopian agronomist who developed a drought- and weed-resistant form of sorghum, one of the world's principals grains, is the winner of this year's $250,000 World Food Prize. Gebisa Ejeta, now a professor of agronomy at Purdue University in West Layfayette, Ind., spent the 1980s and 1990s working in Sudan to create a form of sorghum that yields five to 10 times higher than traditionally grown sorghum.
Most Americans would know sorghum as the small, round yellow seeds commonly found in birdseed. It's actually the second most important feed crop in the USA, mainly given to cattle and poultry and grown in Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska and Kansas, Ejeta says.
"A lot of people who grew up it the Midwest in the '40s and '50s would remember the old syrup for pancakes, made of milo," as sorghum is sometimes called there, he says.
It's also used to make gluten-free beers for people with celiac disease. But in Africa and Asia, it's a major grain, used in porridge and bread, in making beer and popping like popcorn.
FDA: Gluten-free beer can be labeled as such
Sorghum feeds 500 million to 700 million people worldwide, Ejeta says. "It's a huge crop in Africa; it's a very important crop in India. In China it's used for making their national alcoholic beverage," baijiu, or white liquor.
The World Food Prize, known as the "Nobel for food," was created in 1986 by Norman Borlaug, who himself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work creating high-yielding crop varieties estimated to have saved more than 1 billion lives worldwide from famine. Borlaug died Sept. 9.
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