Friday, March 20, 1998

Pinstrup-Andersen Receives Charles A. Black Award

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C., has received the prestigious Charles A. Black Award. This award, which is administered by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), was presented to Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen at CAST's award banquet in Arlington, Virginia, on March 20, with some 100 distinguished agricultural and social scientists present.

The Charles A. Black Award is presented annually by CAST, an Iowa-based organization that interprets environmental and agricultural issues for lawmakers and the media. Each year the award goes to a food or agricultural research scientist who has made significant scientific contributions in his or her field and communicates the importance of this work to the public, policymakers, and news media. The award is named for Dr. Charles A. Black, professor emeritus of agronomy at Iowa State University and a past president and member of CAST.

David R. Lineback, chair of the award committee and dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Idaho, said that Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen was selected for the award because of his international reputation for communicating agriculture and science to diverse audiences and for his outstanding research record.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen, a native of Denmark, is a former director of the Cornell Food and Nutrition Policy Program and professor of food economics at Cornell University. Before his teaching and research positions at Cornell, he served as an agricultural economist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia and director of the Agro-Economic Division at the International Fertilizer Development Center in the United States. Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen holds a bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark and master's and doctoral degrees in agricultural economics from Oklahoma State University. He joined IFPRI as its director general in 1992 and has published widely on important global food and agricultural policy issues.

IFPRI is a Washington, D.C.-based, internationally funded organization established in 1975 to identify and analyze policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world. IFPRI conducts research on ways to achieve sustainable food production and optimize land use, improve food consumption and income levels of the poor, enhance the efficiency of markets and links between agriculture and other sectors of the economy, and improve trade and macroeconomic conditions.