Farmers’ aid lands prize

St Andrews University gives $100,000 award to Plantwise programme to help cut pesticide use

A programme to help smallholder farmers across the world maximise yields and reduce pesticide use has won the St Andrews Prize for the Environment.

Plantwise establishes networks of local plant clinics where farmers can obtain advice on dealing with crop pests, which helps boost production and income.

The global initiative is already seeing a marked decrease in the use of hazardous pesticides, it is claimed.

Led by the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, it has helped more than 9.8 million farmers in 34 countries.

At a ceremony at St Andrews University, Dr Washington Otieno, of Plantwise, was presented with the prize of $100,000.

He said: “It’s a privilege and an honour to win the 2017 St Andrews Prize for the Environment.

“The prize money will help scale up the use of our digital tools and applications, enabling plant doctors to make quicker and better diagnoses and recommendations.

“Improving the speed of data collection will help both the farmers and the environment and more countries will be able to respond to emerging crop pests more promptly.

“We are grateful to our existing donors, whose support has enabled us to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers through sustainable agricultural practices on a global scale.

“The St Andrews Prize for the Environment represents an exciting opportunity to scale up our digital innovations without restrictions.”

The prize is presented annually by the university in conjunction with ConocoPhillips.

Chairman Lord Alex Broers said: “We are delighted to award this year’s St Andrews Prize for the Environment to Plantwise.

“The investment from the prize into each of our finalist projects will make a real difference to their work and we are confident that they will continue to achieve great things in years to come.

“This year’s prize attracted over 800 entries ensuring our screening committee and trustees had an extremely difficult task to select our three finalists.”

The runners-up were an aquaponics initiative in the Philippines and an invention which uses solar refrigerators to power health care centres in disaster zones and unindustrialised regions.