Director's Message

A message from the Director of the Benson Institute, Dr. N. Paul Johnston (Emeritus)

Paul Johnston returns to Brigham Young University’s Department of Animal Science after six years as the director of the Benson Institute.

Due to the efforts of our excellent staff, the Benson Institute has realized new bounds of productivity and considerable growth during the past six years. The central focus of our program has been a cooperative thrust with universities in the developing world to identify and solve problems of hunger and malnutrition. In this program we have helped young scholars in Latin America and Africa complete the thesis portion of their education as they work to solve food security and nutrition problems.

Working with these dynamic, young people has been extremely rewarding. They are filled with a hunger for knowledge and carry with them a profound love for their disadvantaged brothers and sisters. This love is expressed in their attitudes of service and has been the vehicle to gaining the cooperative confidence of villagers and government officials.

Villagers are prone, more often than not, to erect a barrier between themselves and the outside world; hence, it is very difficult to facilitate change in their lives. These young people are able to dissolve those barriers with their humble, warm spirits and enter into the hearts and minds of the rural poor. As a result, we see positive changes in the villages with improved food production and nutritional status.

We deem the conversion of information gleaned from our village studies into quality educational material to be among the more important responsibilities of our labors. To accomplish this task we have called upon the efforts of Brigham Young University students. We have found BYU students to be an incredible resource as we have employed them as translators, writers, designers, and artists in development of educational aids.

All too often valuable re-search information is lost in the archives of developing areas of the world. Though important and profound in nature, it benefits none of the people it intends to reach. Aided by BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, we are digitizing our results on an international data base. It will be available for re-search purposes to anyone worldwide via the Internet. In addition, publishing our research findings has been facilitated by producing our own scientific journal, the RELAN (Revista Latinoamericana de Agricultura y Nutrición), available worldwide, in Spanish, to hundreds of non-governmental and educational agencies.

We have also provided service and learning opportunities in developing communities for many of our BYU students. They impart vast amounts of valuable knowledge acquired through their BYU education to communities in Latin America and Africa. This allows them to gain real life applications of their agronomic and nutritional training in a service-type setting.

Additionally, we have also sought to provide an environment conducive to the research and teaching programs of our Brigham Young faculty. Having empathy for the needs of the disadvantaged in the developing world, many of our faculty are undertaking research programs to investigate and solve those needs. Current projects are being done in conjunction with BYU’s College of Biology and Agriculture to improve the knowledge and use of quinoa and camelids. We are also working with social and health science researchers on a variety of levels.

Dr. Johnston says goodbye to the Benson Institute

Quinoa, a grain with an unusually high protein content, is grown throughout the Andean region. With protein deficiency persisting among these people, improving yield and production parameters is extremely important. Camelids (alpacas and llamas) are used in Andean countries for meat, fiber, and beasts of burden. Unfortunately, large numbers of animals die soon after birth and those that do survive require inordinately long periods of growth and care to reach reproductive size. Researchers in animal science are investing considerable effort to address and solve these problems.

The Institute’s program has been expanded to address not only the needs of Latin America, but also parts of Africa. Within the last years, we have ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to establish co-operative programs in both Ghana and Morocco. Working with the Institute has been a fulfilling experience from a professional and humanitarian standpoint. I am grateful to all those with whom I have had an opportunity to work during the past six years.