Former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, Roger Thurow, has been selected as the annual Ruth Winter Lecturer at Lake Forest College. He'll deliver a lecture titled "The Last Hunger Season: Meeting Our Great Challenge to Feed the World" on Tuesday, February 5 at 7:30 p.m. at Lake Forest College's Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. For more information about the event click here.
Author of the books Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty and The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, Thurow spent thirty years at the Journal covering global affairs in Europe and Africa that spanned the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, the end of apartheid, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the humanitarian crises of the first decade of this century.
In 2010, Thurow joined The Chicago Council on Global Affairs as the senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy, where he leads an initiative to inform the development of federal policies on global agricultural development and food security. Thurow recently became an agriculture fellow for the ONE Campaign against poverty, where he contributes stories about food.
Thurow's discussion will center around the problem of hunger. To meet the growing demand for food from a global population growing in both size and prosperity, food production will need to nearly double by the year 2050. Crucial to the success of this growth is a group of farmers the public knows very little about: the smallholder farmers of the developing world. After decades of neglect, these farmers are now at the very center of food security efforts, including those of the White House, the World Bank, and the Gates Foundation.
The Ruth Winter Lecture series is named in honor of the late Ruth Winter, who was a dynamic director of student activities at Lake Forest College for many years. During her tenure, Ms. Winter was instrumental in bringing many prominent speakers to the College, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Katherine Hepburn, and Dag Hammarskjold. In the spirit of Ruth Winter, this annual lecture features a speaker who is politically, socially and culturally engaged in his or her community. The lecture is free and open to the public.
