ZOE ANDERSON RETURNS FROM THE GLOBAL YOUTH INSTITUTE

Zoe Anderson returned on Saturday, October 17, 2009 having served as one of 120 delegates from around the world at the Global Youth Institute. She was accompanied by her teacher/mentor, Michele Sutton.

Together, Zoe and her teacher traveled to Des Moines, Iowa where they attended the World Food Prize Award ceremony, the Borlaug Dialogue and watched as Bill Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, delivered his first major address on agriculture. Bill Gates used this address to announce $120 million in grants to help the poorest small-holder farmers grow more crops and get them to market. Zoe was selected as one of four students from New York State to attend the three-day event which included a morning dedicated to round table Student / expert discussions of pressing food security and agricultural issues.

This program is sponsored by the New York Youth Institute of Cornell University International Programs, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the World Food Prize Foundation’s Global Youth Institute, the Emerson Foundation and the American Agriculturists Foundation.

Zoe and her peers from around the globe presented their papers in response to the call, “A National Response to Food Insecurity”. Zoe wrote about how granting land rights to impoverished squatters in Guatemala could provide them with capital which they could use to secure funding in the form of micro-loans or grants to purchase inputs required to farm the land they already occupy and produce food.

The student delegation was divided into smaller groups charged with arriving at consensus at the causes of food insecurity and suggestions for solutions. Dr. Gibesa Ejeta, winner of the 2009 World Food Prize and distinguished professor from Purdue University, Dr. Mahabub Hossain from the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and Dr. Thomas Hagen from Pioneer Hi-Bred International served as experts on the nine-member student panel. Following the two-hour panel discussion, Zoe was selected with another student to present their findings to the larger group of several hundred teachers, students and world-renown researchers.

“This was a life-changing experience.” stated Sutton, Zoe’s teacher, “Zoe took advantage of this truly unique opportunity to use what otherwise might have been a mere exercise in research and writing as an opportunity to explore very real issue, to see how today’s policy makers work to resolve issues surrounding food production and foreign policy and to understand how very complex the issues are. Most importantly, it provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a high school student to share her own ideas about such complex issues with those leaders in a position to solve them. I think Zoe has returned inspired to change the world.” The 120 student delegates, including Zoe participated in a service learning effort by preparing 15,000 food packets for starving children in Tanzania. That same evening the group and their teachers participated in Oxfam’s signature “Hunger Banquet” where they experienced first hand the inequalities in our world.

By participating in the Global Youth Institute, Zoe is now eligible to apply for a prestigious Borlaug-Ruan International Internship, an all-expenses-paid, eight-week hands-on research experience, working with world-renowned scientists and policymakers at leading research centers in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.