The Foundation fiat panis promotes innovative projects of agricultural development-related and nutritional research, especially young academics who deal with solutions to the hunger problem.

This year’s Hans H. Ruthenberg-Graduate Award was granted to Eva Salve Tino Bacud, a MSc student from the University of Bonn. Her MSc thesis project “Breeding with an intersectional lens: Understanding farmers’ varietal trait preferences for gender-responsive and socially inclusive breeding goals” genererated an astonishing reaction to the jury, qualifying it as “very original and innovative without precedence in literature”. Her work seeks complexity to order it, and brings light to how intersectionality really matters.

The Herman Eiselen-Science Award winners this year were nothing but inspiring. The jury was looking not only for scientific excelence, but also for applicability of research projects, contribution to food security, personality of candidates, and visibility at international level.

The three awardees excelled in this manner. Dr. Anette Ruml’s (University of Göttingen) study of how the different types of contracts between farmers and purchasers have an effect in the economy and nutrition of the farmers. A comparison between marketing contracts and resource-providing contracts in the small farm sector in Ghana was used as evidence. Dr. Sarah Fischer’s (University of Hohenheim) work “Environmental and farm management effects on food nutrient concentrations and yields of East African staple food crops” showed how soil fertility and drought affect food quality. She highlighted the fact that nutritional measurements for health do not correlate with agronomy measurements for production, creating a gap in the conciliation of these important objectives. Dr. Marion Reichenbach (University of Kassel) applied a system approach to investigate dairy production in the urban environment of Bengaluru, India. Her research addresses the challenges of accounting for resilience and empowering the next generation of farmers.