DSM

A food-science company takes the fight against malnutrition to famine’s front lines.

This year, as decimating famine threatens 20 million lives in Africa and the Middle East, DSM is on the front lines; the fortified-nutrition products it helped the World Food Programme develop reach approximately 31 million people every year. The company is working on longer-term ways to eliminate hunger and malnutrition too: Take African Improved Foods, its creatively-financed joint venture with the Rwandan government and development agencies, aimed at boosting the local food-processing industry. AIF’s Kigali-based plant, which produces fortified cereal—much of it for WFP—is operated by East Africans, and its cereals are made with locally-grown maize and soybeans procured from 7,500 smallholder farmers.