November 27, 1998

PINSTRUP-ANDERSEN RECEIVES OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI 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 Oklahoma State University (OSU) Distinguished Alumni Award. This award was presented to Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen at the OSU Alumni Association's awards ceremony in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on November 21.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen joined a group of six other distinguished OSU alumni as an award recipient. The awards recognize alumni who have been of significant service to OSU and the OSU Alumni Association. Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen received his master's degree (1967) and Ph.D. (1969) in agricultural economics at OSU. In addition to his degrees from OSU, Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen holds a bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark.

A native of Denmark, Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen 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 Alabama. He joined IFPRI as its director general in 1992 and has published widely on important global food and agricultural policy issues.

Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen's other awards include a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Economics Institute at the University of Colorado. And in 1997, he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Technical Science by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, for his outstanding contributions to research in the field of nutrition economics and his dedicated leadership in efforts to achieve worldwide food security, especially in the poorest nations.

In 1998, he received the Charles A. Black Award for his outstanding record of research and communication by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. He has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, Rockefeller Foundation, World Food Council, the United Nations, Danish Aid Agency, and the governments of Colombia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka.

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.