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Noted speakers highlight Rotary conference in Charles City

  • Charles City Rotary Club member and District Gov. Ralph Smith, right, awards the Rotary Service Above Self Award to Asher Schroeder, a speaker at the Rotary district conference in Charles City Saturday. Press photo by Bob Steenson

  • Kenneth Quinn, former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia and now president of the World Food Prize, talks to attendees at the district Rotary Club conference held in Charles City Saturday. Press photo by Bob Steenson

  • Jerry Nelson, professor emeritus of agronomy at the University of Missouri, talks about his many trips to North Korea, Saturday during the district Rotary Club conference held in Charles City. Press photo by Bob Steenson

  • Rotarians attending the district conference in Charles City Saturday form a river for a fundraising "duck race" in the parking lot of Trinity United Methodist Church. Press photo by Bob Steenson

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

More than 100 Rotarians and spouses from all over the north half of Iowa gathered in Charles City Friday and Saturday to join with the local Rotary for the clubs’ annual district conference.

Highlights of the event were talks by three internationally known speakers:

• Kenneth Quinn — of Dubuque, the former ambassador to Cambodia and current president of the World Food Prize, talked a little about his time working for the State Department during the Vietnam War, but spent most of the time talking about the importance of the World Food Prize, started by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, who was raised in Cresco.

Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, for his efforts to increase crop production that led to new strains of wheat that started the “Green Revolution.” Because of his efforts to prevent hunger and famine around the world, it has been said that Borlaug saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived, Quinn said.

Borlaug was the only person to have won the Peace Prize for work in agriculture, and he urged the Nobel academy to create an award in agriculture similar to the ones in physics, chemistry, literature and medicine, Quinn said, but the academy paid little mind to his suggestion.

Borlaug set about establishing his own World Food Prize, and in 1999 hired Quinn, telling him he wanted the prize to become as important as the Nobel Prize and to be the center of attention of American agriculture.

After hearing it was for Borlaug, Gov. Tom Vilsack and the Republican leaders of the Legislature agreed to allow the prize to be awarded in the state Capitol.

“So, now, every October, we’ll be in the magnificent Iowa state Capitol presenting our prize, and everyone who comes from outside Iowa, particularly from overseas, they walk in and they are blown away. It looks more like the Nobel Prize than the Nobel Prize looks,” Quinn said.

Leaders from around the world show up, he said, including people from countries that are not friendly to each other. The event has grown from several dozen friends of Borlaug in the first years to more than 2,000 people attending a week’s worth of events today.

“It’s the power of agriculture to bring people together across huge differences when confronting hunger,” he said. There have been 46 World Food Prize winners so far, from 18 countries and the United Nations.

He also talked about other programs, such as various programs for youth to inspire and help train the next generation, and the Borlaug Dialogue that brings speakers to Iowa from around the world to talk about food security issues, including, “Can we feed 9 billion people by the year 2046?”

“We have the greatest challenge in human history,” he said.

• Asher Schroeder — of Maquoketa, a World War II veteran who was injured in a battle in Germany’s Hurtgen Forest in the fall after the D-Day invasion, was captured by the Germans and held as a POW for five months, came home to learn his father had died of cancer on the day he had been liberated, went on to earn his law degree and become U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa.

In 2005, with a friend who was a German Rotary Exchange student, Schroeder provided seed money to help start a community foundation in Germany, the country that had once held him captive.

After his talk at the conference Saturday, Schroeder was honored with the Rotary’s Service Above Self Award, the highest honor the international organization bestows.

• Jerry Nelson — Professor emeritus of agronomy at the University of Missouri, who has been involved in 40 trips to North Korea where he has worked with the people there on improving their crops and forage.

Nelson talked about the “Two Faces of North Korea,” and the differences between rural life and city life in the capital of Pyongyang, and the differences between the official description of the lives of the citizens as told by the government and the actual experiences of the people as seen by Nelson.

He said the country currently has the capacity to produce about 70 percent of what the population needs for food, so a great deal of food is imported, and a growing underground market is increasing in importance to supplement the food provided by the government.

The country faces natural obstacles to growing food, Nelson said, including a large portion of the country being mountainous, and a growing season that has periods that are very dry and a period that is extremely wet.

Self-imposed obstacles include a government that dictates which crops will be planted and sets precise times for planting and harvesting, without any flexibility that could increase yields. Of the crops that are raised, about 30 percent of the harvest is lost to disease, insects and rodents, Nelson said.

He said one of the frustrations he has dealt with is working with the U.S. State Department on what he is allowed to do in North Korea.

If he is helping increase food production, or pasture production for livestock, for humanitarian uses — that is, directly feeding people — then he can participate, but if the effort is to help farmers grow enough crops or meat to sell at market, that isn’t humanitarian aid and he can’t take part.

For example, Nelson said, he was working with a group that wanted to increase pasture production for livestock, either for dairy cattle or for beef.

The State Department said if the pasture was for dairy, where milk would be dried and made available to schools and hospitals, that was OK, but if it was for beef, which would be shipped to Pyongyand and sold at market, his participation wouldn’t be allowed. And if he didn’t know for which it would be used, his participation wouldn’t be allowed.

Nelson said that in 2016, relations between the U.S. and North Korea changed for the worse, but he is hopeful that if a planned summit between President Trump and President Kim Jong-un takes place as is currently planned this month, something good will come from it.

Also at the district conference were district business, awards presentations, entertainment and other speakers, as well as fundraisers including a “duck race” where plastic ducks were sent bobbing down a river made of a huge sheet of plastic. Winners received a designation as a Paul Harris Fellow, a club honor for those who have met fundraising goals for the Rotary Foundation.

 

 

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