Harshita Krupadanam, a junior at the Quarry Lane School in Dublin, California, was selected as one of 215 students chosen from a group of 10,000 applicants worldwide to attend the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute, a two-week long virtual event, earlier this fall, hosted in conjunction with the Norman E. Borlaug International Symposium.

After seeing the plight of farmers losing their crops to unseasonal rains in India and suffering further from COVID-19 suppression measures, the Indian American student researched and proposed engineering solutions for on-site temporary storage of harvested crops, according to a news release.

She submitted her innovative designs for “harvest pods” in a paper, Harvest Loss Prevention Using On-site Storage, to the World Food Prize Foundation Summer Youth Institute.

Krupadanam was then selected to attend the Summer Youth Institute as a Borlaug Scholar where she presented her research and recommendations to a panel of professors, global food security experts, and peer students, the release said.

She was selected to attend the Global Youth Institute for the relevance of her solution to the current global situation around COVID-19, and the many domino effects the crisis has caused in food security, agriculture, economic development, trade, and more. She was the only student selected from the San Francisco Bay Area and one of six from California, it adds.

Krupadanam attended the two-week virtual Borlaug Dialogue and Global Youth Institute conferences in October. She presented her original research paper and participated in roundtable discussions with leading experts in industry, technological innovation, and international policy, the release notes.

“Attending the Global Youth Institute was a remarkable experience. I had the opportunity to present my proposal to safeguard the harvested crops of farmers in India and learn from laureates and food security experts from all around the world,” she said. “I am also thankful that I had a chance to speak with World Food Prize laureate Dr. Howarth Bouis about genetics, an area of research that interests me greatly.”

Global Youth Institute attendees participated in the full array of International Borlaug Dialogue sessions, which featured former Vice President Al Gore; 2020 World Food Prize ceremony honoring Dr. Rattan Lal; a keynote by King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein of Jordan; and researchers and non-profit leaders from around the globe.

For the first time in the history of GYI, student delegates were given the opportunity to share their ideas from their research papers in a collaborative report that will be submitted to the advisors of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, the release said. 

His research and work have impacted 500 million smallholder farmers across four continents, improved nutritional security for more than two billion people and has saved hundreds of millions of hectares of natural tropical ecosystems.

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