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Sowing Seeds The work of Conrad Evans and other OSU personnel to build schools and colleges in developing countries a halfcentury ago is producing some the greatest minds in the world today.
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urdue agronomist Gebisa Ejeta’s visit to the OSU campus last February was a special treat for one former OSU staff member. Ejeta thanked Conrad Evans personally for his and others’ service to Ethiopia in the 1950s and ’60s as part of the United States’ Technical Cooperation Administration. Evans was one of dozens of OSU personnel who helped set up the East African nation’s educational system according to the land-grant university model of agricultural extension, service and research, a program tailor-made for the nation beset by troubled crops and a lack of technological development. They helped built schools and clinics from the ground up while also teaching students, working with farmers and the government in crop and land management and setting up lasting contributions such as the development of Ethiopia’s renowned coffee crop. Evans worked at the Jimma Agricultural Technical School (today’s Jimma University), established in 1952. He also worked at the college of agriculture, then a part of Haile Selassie I University. The college is now where (see Evans page 70)
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One of the world’s top scientists began his education in a modest Ethiopian high school and college built and staffed by OSU.
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ine hundred and sixty-three million people in the world went hungry in 2008, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Hundreds of millions of those people were in the sub-Saharan region of Africa, where nations such as Ethiopia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan and the Côte d’Ivoire battle famine and other problems. It’s a part of the world where a huge portion of the population practices subsistence agriculture, surviving on the food they grow. But thanks to charities, governmental organizations and people like Gebisa Ejeta, the 2009 winner of the World Food Prize, millions less are going hungry today. Ejeta, an Ethiopian agronomist, has developed new, hardier strains of sorghum, one of the leading cereal grains produced in Africa, and pioneered more effective ways to fight a parasitic weed that harms them. “I wish I could tell you it’s effortless,” says Ejeta, during a visit to OSU in February to accept his Henry G. Bennett Distinguished Fellowship award and to give a presentation during Research Week. “I think it’s more the persistence and resilience to roll with the punches and move on, staying true to the mission you have in mind. And that mission is about serving humanity.” When he’s not working with his graduate students at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., Ejeta travels the world, working (see Ejeta page 70)
S T O R I E S By M aT T E l l I O T T