Seiei Toyama

2003 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Peace and International Understanding from Japan. A former professor and a Japanese authority on desert agriculture, Seiei Toyama decided to spend his retirement years reversing the increasing desertification of Inner Mongolia, and thus preserve the numerous communities being destroyed by yearly sandstorms coming from the Gobi desert. In 1991, he founded the Japan Association for Greening Deserts and began recruiting tree-planting volunteers, who had to pay their own way and even bring their own shovels and wheelbarrows.

Leading a total of 335 volunteer teams from all walks of life, Toyama has demonstrated how systematic, determined and collective effort can hold China's encroaching deserts at bay. Despite many setbacks, a forest of three million poplars, all planted and nurtured by hand, now stands where before there lay only the desolate desert sands; agriculture is once again possible and desert communities have renewed hope. His 5,000 volunteers from Japan and China have also shown how working together to save the earth breeds mutual understanding and reconciliation. Despite his age, Toyama continues to accompany his volunteers to the Engebei desert, exhorting them never to give up working together to meet the desert's challenge.