Borlaug Scholar · Kerim Demirkol · Field Notes, Decoders, and the Path to a December 2026 Revision
Scholar-athlete · Borlaug Scholar through the World Food Prize and Wageningen Youth Institute · Recognised 26 January 2023
Borlaug Scholar. The essay that started everything.
A Borlaug Scholar through the inaugural World Food Prize and Wageningen Youth Institute. Recognised in January 2023 for a research paper on obesity and food hunger in the Philippines, submitted the previous month. This page is the honest record, namely the original paper, the reviewer letter, the four Field Notes the recognition set in motion, the operational decoders that read every can, and the December 2026 revision still being written.
Kerim Demirkol · Submitted · Recognised · Updated May 2026
Why This Matters
The argument that earned the recognition
Most people treat obesity and food hunger as separate problems, namely one a crisis of excess and the other a crisis of scarcity. The 2022 paper argued they are the same problem in the Philippines. They are produced by the same broken food environment, driven by the same income inequality, and profited from by the same ultra-processed food economy. Any intervention has to be structural, not a consumer-side label-reading exercise.
The paper was named a Borlaug Scholar work. It also began the pathway toward medicine, because understanding how food systems fail people is not separate from understanding how to heal them.
The thesis, in its original wording
“The term ‘Food Literacy’ should go beyond food labels but a systemic governance measure to take corporations and individuals accountable for their routine decisions they make.”
Paper at a Glance
Author
Kerim Demirkol
Submitted to
Inaugural World Food Prize and Wageningen Youth Institute
The Philippines is not a country with hunger in one neighbourhood and obesity in another. The two crises sit on the same retail shelves, in the same households, sometimes in the same body. The technical name is the triple burden of malnutrition: a body can be technically overweight while still missing iron, vitamin A, zinc. Cheap calories fill the stomach but starve the cell. The numbers below are from the 2023 National Nutrition Survey, presented by DOST-FNRI in June 2025.
Crisis One · Food Insecurity
31.4%of households
Filipino households experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity. Low income in cities prices families out of nutrition by the cost of quality.
Crisis Two · Adult Obesity
39.8%of adults
Adult obesity prevalence. Cheap, shelf-stable, ultra-processed food fills the calorie gap that fresh food cannot, at a long-term cardiovascular cost.
The same corporations that profit from food insecurity sell ultra-processed food back into the affected households. The block with the obesity epidemic and the block with the food-hunger crisis are not two different blocks. They are the same block, with extreme income inequality as the engine driving both.
The Proposed System
From essay to policy architecture
The paper proposed a ten-point solution, organised around three forms of access. The recommendations were anchored in machinery that already existed in the Philippines, namely the Barangay Nutrition Scholars, the Interagency Task Force on Zero Hunger, and the National Nutrition Council, instead of imagining new institutions.
A · Access to Food
1
Municipal food banks managed by Barangay Nutrition Scholars
Plug into the existing Barangay Nutrition Scholar network rather than building a parallel institution.
2
Incentives for cultivating uncultivated farmland
Move idle land into food production with structured agricultural incentives.
3
Restrict ultra-processed overproduction
Limit the supply of cheap, shelf-stable processed product that crowds out fresh food in low-income markets.
B · Access to Health Education
4
Awareness campaigns on the double burden
Make obesity and food hunger legible as one problem rather than two separate moral framings.
5
Food Literacy as systemic governance
Redefine food literacy beyond food labels, namely as a governance measure that holds corporations and individuals accountable for routine food decisions.
6
Curriculum integration in public schools
Embed nutrition and food-system literacy in basic education so the next generation arrives knowing what is being sold to them.
C · Access to Opportunities
7
Rural water and farmland infrastructure
Treat rural infrastructure as the precondition for fresh-food economics, not as an afterthought.
8
Profitable food-bank business models
Design food banks that generate revenue rather than depending on indefinite charity, so the institution survives political cycles.
9
Tie-up with the Interagency Task Force on Zero Hunger
Connect the proposal to the existing inter-agency machinery rather than competing with it.
10
Coordination with the National Nutrition Council
Make the National Nutrition Council the policy home of the framework, so the work survives any single administration.
An Honest Reckoning
What the recognition came with, and what it didn’t
The paper had real diagnostic insight. It named the food environment as a single system, refused the consumer-blame framing, and grounded its solutions in existing institutions. That structural clarity is the part the World Food Prize Board of Reviewers responded to.
It also had the limitations of a first formal research paper. The reviewers caught them and named them, in writing, in 2023.
The five flaws the reviewers named, 2023
Solutions lacked detail. Big proposals; thin operational specifics.
The corporatised food-pantry proposal contradicted the paper’s own diagnosis. Asking the corporations to fund the fix while accusing them of profiting from the problem.
The research-materials section was decorative rather than analytical. Sources cited but not interrogated.
49% of the paper consisted of quoted or copied source text without proper in-text citation. A discipline-of-attribution failure that has to be fixed before any medical-school admissions reader sees the work.
Two questions were left unanswered. One on government barriers; one on citizen levers. Both were structural, both deserved a real answer, neither got one.
For three years, that feedback was set aside. This page exists because hiding the critique alongside the recognition would betray the entire premise of being a Borlaug Scholar in the first place. Naming the flaws alongside the strengths is the point.
The full revision is targeted for completion by end of 2026, namely costed solutions, named stakeholders, geographic and cultural specificity, citation discipline at a medical-school admissions standard, and the system named as transnational rather than domestic.
The Borlaug Scholar Field Notes
Four Field Notes building toward the revision
The work between recognition and revision is not silent. The Borlaug Scholar Field Notes are an essay series that uses the global canned-sardine industry as a lens for examining food marketing, nutrition literacy, and economic inequality, namely the same diagnostic frame the revised paper has to inherit. Each Field Note is paired with an operational decoder that lets a reader audit one can on their own counter.
Each Field Note is paired with an operational decoder. A reader who finishes a Field Note can immediately audit the can in their hand. The five tools sit in the same evidence-disciplined frame as the original paper, namely structural rather than consumer-blame, with explicit evidence-confidence levels stated throughout.