The 2026 World Food Prize has been awarded to Huub Lelieveld, a Dutch scientist who spent six decades leading research, advocacy and institution-building in food safety and helped bring about globally harmonised standards. The prize was presented in Des Moines, Iowa, at the opening of the Borlaug International Dialogue.
Speaking at the ceremony, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), said ending hunger needs enough food, distributed well, and confidence that it will not make people ill. "Food that makes people sick does not feed them," he said. He put the toll of unsafe food at 866 million people made ill, and an estimated $110 billion a year in lost productivity and medical costs in low- and middle-income countries alone.
The annual prize honours Norman Borlaug, whose higher-yielding wheat varieties are credited with lifting hundreds of millions of people out of hunger. This year's gathering drew more than 1,000 participants from more than 60 countries and 600 organisations, including four agriculture ministers and past laureates.
Qu praised Lelieveld's conviction that access to safe food is a universal right and said FAO supports developing countries in putting food safety standards into practice, particularly countries that depend on imports, where harmonised standards save lives and cut trade costs.
He reminded the audience that food safety problems cross borders and income levels, recalling how aflatoxin contaminated maize across the American Midwest after the 2012 drought. The same contamination is a scourge in much of Africa and South Asia, he said, threatening health and income and keeping farmers out of markets that would pay them more.
Qu named the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the International Plant Protection Convention, both hosted by FAO, as critical institutions, along with FAO's new Global Partnership Programme for Transboundary Animal Diseases (GPP-TAD), which protects producers through shared surveillance, biosecurity and rapid response. "Safe food is the foundation of food security," he said.
Source: FAO Newsroom
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