by Neil Palmer | CIAT Apr 11, 2016
CIAT’s Colin Khoury has received the 2016 Hugo de Vries Award for his landmark doctoral thesis on changing human diets and the importance of wild plants to global food security.
The annual award is a joint initiative of the Royal Botanical Society of the Netherlands and the Hugo de Vries Foundation. It recognises important research related to botany conducted at a Dutch university. Khoury undertook the work while a PhD student at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, and a visiting researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
His research found that over the past 50 years, human diets have become ever more similar as commodity crops like wheat, rice, maize and soy make up an increasing proportion of what we eat. This, he argued, is dangerous because dependence on a limited number of plants means our food supply is overexposed to the risk of crop failure. More frequent droughts, floods and outbreaks of plant pests and diseases as a result of climate change are likely to exacerbate this risk.
- See more at: http://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/im-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants-ciat-scientist-wins-hugo-de-vries-award/#sthash.hWS80oPU.dpuf
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