Gebisa Ejeta: The Man Who Knew Hunger and Helped Feed a Continent

By Aksah Italo
Published on 02/23/26

Gebisa Ejeta was a boy who understood the gnawing of an empty stomach. In the village of Wollonkomi in west central Oromia, hunger was not an event but a season that returned with unnerving regularity.

On certain mornings he set out for school with nothing but dust on his sandals and a tightening in his belly.

“When I went to school away from home, invariably I was hungry,” he later recalled. In grade school, he could count on his fingers the days he ate breakfast.

“Hunger is something I have immensely experienced,” he once said, without ornament or self pity. It was not rhetoric. It was memory.

He was born in a one room thatched hut to a mother who had never been taught to read. Illiterate she may have been, but she possessed a stern and unyielding faith in education.

It was the only inheritance she could offer. Each day he walked more than twenty kilometres to attend a modern school beyond the village.

The journey was long enough to discourage ambition, yet she insisted. The alternative was a life bound tightly to subsistence farming in a country where drought arrives ubiquitously and leaves no room.

 “I owe it to my mother,” he says.

He excelled in his studies, finishing at the top of his class. When the time came to choose a discipline before eighth grade entrance exam, he selected agriculture.

“I didn’t know the reason at the time,” he said “It just felt right”

The field promised relevance. In Ethiopia, where farming underwrites survival for the majority, to improve a crop is to influence whether households eat, whether markets function, whether children grow.

He enrolled at Alemaya College of Agriculture, now Haramaya University, an institution that has shaped generations of the country’s agricultural scientists. There his aptitude sharpened into purpose. He graduated with distinction and earned the opportunity to study under the American crop scientist John Axtell at Purdue University.

For a young man who had once rationed his strength on long walks to school, the leap to a leading American research university was immense. He accepted without hesitation. At Purdue he completed both his master’s and doctorate in plant breeding and genetics. The work was rigorous, statistical, and unsentimental.

His attention settled on sorghum, the grain of his childhood table. Globally, Sorghum ranks fifth among cereals after maize, wheat, rice, and barley. It feeds over 500 hundred million people, particularly in Africa where other crops falter.

In these landscapes sorghum is not simply food. It is survival. But the crop had a persistent enemy in Striga, a parasitic weed that attaches to plant roots and siphons off nutrients before the farmer sees any visible sign of attack.

By the time the purple flowers appear above the soil, the damage is already done. Across Africa, Striga has been estimated to affect tens of millions of hectares and threatens the livelihoods of more than 100 million people.

For nearly a decade Gebisa and his colleagues laboured over the problem. They crossed lines, analysed genetic markers, and tested varieties under punishing field conditions.

“We identified an important gene that is foundational for imparting Striga resistance,” he explained in a research update, compressing years of painstaking inquiry into a single restrained sentence.

The result was a series of sorghum hybrids that resisted both drought and the parasitic weed, delivering dramatically improved yields in environments long considered marginal.

In some areas farmers harvested multiples of what their traditional varieties had produced.

The breakthrough was not merely scientific. It was a matter of survivial. By stabilising yields, the new hybrids strengthened household incomes and reduced exposure to famine.

In regions where a failed crop can mean months of hunger, resilience is a form of protection more valuable than abundance. The improved varieties were released in countries including Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Kenya, spreading quietly through seed systems and farmer networks.

In 2009 his work was recognised with the World Food Prize, one of the biggest recognitions in the world. The prize’s founder, Norman Borlaug, hailed him as an exemplar of science deployed in service of humanity and as proof that advanced genetics can be directed toward the needs of the poorest farmers.

Later he received the National Medal of Science, one of the highest scientific honours in the United States. Presenting the medal, Joe Biden praised his work for improving food security for millions and strengthening what he called the soul of nations.

The boy who once counted breakfasts now stood in rooms where policy and power converge.

Yet the statistics that animate his life’s work remain stubborn. According to the World Food Programme, roughly 318 million people worldwide are projected to face acute food insecurity in 2026, driven by conflict, climate shocks, and economic instability.

Africa bears a disproportionate share of that burden. In West and Central Africa alone, more than 55 million people are expected to experience crisis levels of hunger during the lean season without sustained intervention. Across the continent, the prevalence of undernourishment has hovered above 20 percent in recent assessments, translating to well over 300 million people unable to secure sufficient food on a consistent basis.

In the Horn of Africa, recurrent droughts have compounded fragility, while in parts of the Sahel conflict has disrupted both planting and markets. The arithmetic is unforgiving.

Gebisa has long argued that the persistence of hunger in an age of scientific sophistication is not inevitable but indicting. In reflecting on global disparities, he observed that in a world capable of mapping genomes and transmitting information instantly across continents, the endurance of chronic hunger is a sad commentary on humanity at large. His own ambition, however, has never drifted toward celebrity.

“My biggest happiness is to help humanity any way I can,” he has said.

Many people who are working under him recognise him a man filled with humility; A man who never let his fame and recognition get in the way of insistingly helping humanity.

Today the seeds shaped by his research are planted across dry-lands where farmers still scan the horizon for rain. He says that his journey has taken a thatched hut in rural Ethiopia to the highest ranks of global.

He once walked kilometres to reach a classroom, counting the rare days he had eaten. Today his work travels far beyond that dusty road, carried in grain heads that bend beneath a harsher sun and yet endure.

“I am glad my mother lived to see the recognition I received,” he said.