Business for Peace Foundation The Story of 2017 Honouree Murad Al-Katib Al-Katib’s childhood was a merging between rural Saskatchewan and the wider world. After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan’s commerce program in 1994 with Honours, Al-Katib talked his way into the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. Less than a year after he graduated, he returned to Saskatchewan and took a job with the newly established Saskatchewan Trade and Export Partnership, promoting trade from Saskatchewan to the broader world. It gave him extensive travel opportunities and ample time to consider the provincial economy in international terms. Al-Katib remembers seeing fields sowed with wheat, the traditional crop in the area near Davidson where he grew up and began to see a new crop, pulses, emerging in the familiar fields and wondered what opportunities they could provide. In 1981, Saskatchewan farmers grew roughly 85,000 acres of lentils. A decade later, that figure had grown to about 450,000 acres. Al-Katib recognised that lentils were becoming an increasingly viable option for Saskatchewan producers, the opportunity was there, and Al-Katib seized it. In 2001, he quit his job for an uncertain future in an emerging industry. The decision would transform his life and eventually make him one of Canada’s most respected agricultural experts. His company, AGT Foods and Ingredients, buys lentils and other pulses from producers and sells them around the world. It began production in 2003, went public in 2007 and eventually grew into one of the world’s largest lentil companies, handling about a quarter of the global supply. Murad Al-Katib is today the President, CEO and board member of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. He has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the 2016 Ernst and Young “Canadian Entrepreneur of the Year” Award, the United Nations Association of Canada “Global Citizen Laureate Award” as well as being recognized as one of the “44 Innovators Who Shaped Prairie Agriculture in Canada» by the Western Producer, Canada’s leading agriculture newspaper. AGT’s success is in part a product of its CEO’s experience, ambition and vision. Al-Katib’s formative experiences allowed him to connect domestic production with global demand. AGT’s philosophy — “From Producer to the World” — only partially explains the company’s growth. Timing was also important: Al-Katib was able to transform his basement musings into a global, profitable company because his vision coincided with an agricultural revolution. Under Murad’s leadership, AGT is a major partner with United Nations World Food Programme through its operations in Canada and Turkey. AGT estimates that its supplies to the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to feed over 4 million refugee families per year through the family ration distribution program for Syrian refugees. Murad is committed to children advocacy through a multi-year commitment to the Canadian Red Cross as the patron sponsor in Saskatchewan to benefit the Red Cross disaster response programme, as well as the “Imagine No Bullying” educational program that reaches 33,000 school age children in Saskatchewan annually.