The University of Pretoria (UP) will be one of the institutions collaborating in a series of projects representing the best ideas and strategies from around the world to address hunger and undernutrition in some of the world’s most unforgiving agricultural regions. The selected projects, which will be funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum and Millet, will contribute towards improving food security, household resilience and private-sector growth in Ethiopia, Senegal and Niger through the enhancement of production and value-added product development.
 

Through a call for competitive proposals, the 2014 recipients of funding were identified. Following a rigorous selection process that included recommendations from the Lab’s external advisory board and dozens of ad-hoc reviewers, only ten projects were eventually selected from the 58 proposals received. UP was the only South African University selected to collaborate on a project.

‘These projects represent the best ideas and strategies, drawn from around the world, to tackle hunger and undernutrition in some of the world’s most difficult agricultural regions,’ said Timothy Dalton, associate professor of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University and director of the Lab. ‘The process will require patience, hard work and dedication, and we’ve assembled a fantastic team to attack these problems.’

The project on which UP has been selected to collaborate with Texas A&M University in the USA and Ethiopia’s Hawassa University will focus on ‘Developing superior functionality in sorghum for food applications to promote the sorghum value chain in Ethiopia’. The principal investigator on the project will be Professor Joseph Awika from Texas A&M University, who has previously collaborated with researchers from UP’s Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. An amount of $809 941 has been allocated to this project.