The winner of the 2023 World Food Prize is launching a program to reestablish vineyards and farmland in parts of Ukraine damaged in the in the war with Russia.
Heidi Kühn, founder of Roots of Peace, will receive the award at a ceremony in the Iowa State Capitol Thursday night. The U.S-based nonprofit works in war-torn nations to clear landmines and unexploded bombs, and to restore the land to raise high value crops.
The organization has aided farmers in Croatia, Afghanistan, Guatemala and Azerbaijan, among other countries.
“This is fertile ground that feeds us,” Kühn said at a press conference Wednesday. “So I think this is not a political call to action, this is a moral call to action.”
Kühn says the risk of injury from unexploded ordinances can harm local economies and restrict food production for decades.
“As land mines are in there it’s holding the land hostage from business opportunity.”
In Vietnam, the group is still clearing mines placed in the demilitarized zone 50-plus years ago.
Kühn says, in restored areas, farmers have planted more than 1 million black pepper trees. The harvested peppercorns are exported to the U.S. and other foreign markets and bear a Roots of Peace label.
Roots of Peace is now turning attention toward Ukraine where an area critical to the global wheat supply has been contaminated by landmines and cluster munitions.
The impacted area of Ukraine is estimated to cover 22 million acres, about the same amount of land devoted to corn and soybeans in Iowa.
“Those mines and the unexploded ordinance will have to be cleared before that land can be put back into productive use and become flourishing farmland once again,” said Jamie Franklin, executive director of Mines Advisory Group which conducts mine removal in areas where Roots of Peace operates.
Franklin said mine removal in Ukraine will begin soon in a grape-growing region in the southern part of the country.
“This is a current conflict, but we're working in Lebanon 33 years after the end of the civil war, where landmines continue to impact the lives of civilians but also continue to limit agricultural development, farming and food security,” Franklin said. “And in Vietnam, where 50 years after the last bombs were dropped, unexploded ordinance still limits the use of land, limits agricultural production and also impacts food security.”
The World Food Prize Laureate is awarded $250,000 as part of the annual Norman Borlaug Dialogue, a global symposium on food security held in Des Moines in honor of the Iowa native and Nobel Prize winner.
Listen to Ben Kieffer's conversation with Kühn on IPR's River to River podcast.
