Indian Scientist Modadugu Gupta Named Winner of 2005 World Food Prize

September 07, 2005

NEW DELHI -- An Indian scientist has been named winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize in the U.S. for his work to enhance nutrition for over one million people, mostly very poor women, through the expansion of aquaculture and fish farming in South and Southeast Asia and Africa. Dr. Modadugu V. Gupta will receive the prize on October 13, 2005 in Des Moines, Iowa, USA.

Dr. Gupta's name was announced by Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation, recently at a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., presided over by the USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios and Acting Undersecretary of State E. Anthony Wayne.

Gupta had been selected for this honor based on his work over three decades at the World Fish Center, a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) of the World Bank. Through his dedicated and sustained efforts in Bangladesh, Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia, Gupta made small scale aquaculture a viable means for over one million very poor farmers and women to improve their family's nutrition and wellbeing. As a result of Gupta's efforts, freshwater fish production has risen dramatically in these countries by as much as three to five times, he added. The World Food Prize Foundation in Des Moines says in his 31 years in aquaculture, and a total of 40 years in fisheries research, Gupta repeatedly and successfully found ways to help the poor, including landless farmers and women, become fish farmers. He developed unique methods of fish farming, requiring little cost while causing no environmental damage.

As a result, landless farmers and poor women have turned a million abandoned pools, roadside ditches, seasonally flooded fields and other bodies of water into mini-factories churning out fish for food and income. Keen to duplicate the success achieved in Asia, Gupta is working with a growing number of African countries to implement similar measures.

The World Food Prize was conceived by Dr. Norman Borlaug, recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize. Gupta is the sixth Indian to receive the prize since it was established in 1986. Previous recipients include: Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, 1987; Dr. Verghese Kurien, 1989; Dr. Gurdev Khush, 1996; B.R. Barwale, 1998 and Dr. Surinder K. Vasal, 2000.