Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize since 1980:

Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize since 1980:

• 2009: U.S. President Barack Obama

• 2008: Martti Ahtisaari

• 2007: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore

• 2006: Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank

• 2005: International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei

• 2004: Wangari Maathai

• 2003: Shirin Ebadi

• 2002: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

• 2001: United Nations, Kofi Annan

• 2000: Kim Dae-jung

• 1999: Medecins Sans Frontieres

• 1998: John Hume, David Trimble

• 1997: International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Jody Williams

• 1996: Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Jose Ramos-Horta

• 1995: Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

• 1994: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin

• 1993: Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk

• 1992: Rigoberta Menchu Tum

• 1991: Aung San Suu Kyi

• 1990: Mikhail Gorbachev

• 1989: The 14th Dalai Lama

• 1988: U.N. Peacekeeping Forces

• 1987: Oscar Arias Sanchez

• 1986: Elie Wiesel

• 1985: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

• 1984: Desmond Tutu

• 1983: Lech Walesa

• 1982: Alva Myrdal, Alfonso Garcia Robles

• 1981: Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

• 1980: Adolfo Perez Esquivel

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO — President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama’s name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.

Speculation had focused on Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a Colombian senator and a Chinese dissident, along with an Afghan woman’s rights activist.

The Nobel committee praised Obama’s creation of “a new climate in international politics” and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage. The plaudit appeared to be a slap at President George W. Bush from a committee that harshly criticized Obama’s predecessor for resorting to largely unilateral military action in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee said. “In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

He added that the committee endorsed “Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’”

President Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906 and President Woodrow Wilson won in 1919.

The committee chairman said after awarding the 2002 prize to former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, for his mediation in international conflicts, that it should be seen as a “kick in the leg” to the Bush administration’s hard line in the buildup to the Iraq war.

Five years later, the committee honored Bush’s adversary in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, for his campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

The Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations for this year’s prize though it was not immediately apparent who nominated Obama.

“The exciting and important thing about this prize is that it’s given too someone … who has the power to contribute to peace,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.

Nominators include former laureates; current and former members of the committee and their staff; members of national governments and legislatures; university professors of law, theology, social sciences, history and philosophy; leaders of peace research and foreign affairs institutes; and members of international courts of law.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation welcomed the award on behalf of its founder Nelson Mandela, who shared the 1993 Peace Prize with then-South African President F.W. DeKlerk for their efforts at ending years of apartheid and laying the groundwork for a democratic country.

“We trust that this award will strengthen his commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty,” the foundation said.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish institutions, he said the peace prize should be given out by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Sweden and Norway were united under the same crown at the time of Nobel’s death.

The committee has taken a wide interpretation of Nobel’s guidelines, expanding the prize beyond peace mediation to include efforts to combat poverty, disease and climate change.

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Associated Press Writer Ian MacDougall contributed to this report

In Rural Africa, a Fertile Market for Mobile Phones

By SARAH ARNQUIST, Uganda — Laban Rutagumirwa charges his mobile phone with a car battery because his dirt-floor home deep in the remote, banana-covered hills of western Uganda does not have electricity.

When the battery dies, Mr. Rutagumirwa, a 50-year-old farmer, walks just over four miles to charge it so he can maintain his position as communication hub and banana-disease tracker for his rural neighbors.

In an area where electricity is scarce and Internet connections virtually nonexistent, the mobile phone has revolutionized scientists’ ability to track this crop disease and communicate the latest scientific advances to remote farmers.

With his phone, Mr. Rutagumirwa collects digital photos, establishes global positioning system coordinates and stores completed 50-question surveys from nearby farmers with sick plants. He sends this data, wirelessly and instantly, to scientists in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

“We never had any idea about getting information with the phone,” Mr. Rutagumirwa said. “It was a mystery. Now our mind is wide open.”

Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market worldwide. Entrepreneurs and development organizations are eagerly seizing the opportunity presented by such growth. They are creating mobile phone applications for profitable and nonprofit ventures across the continent. Millions of Africans, for example, now use their mobile phones to transfer money, turn on water wells, learn soccer game scores and buy and sell goods.

The penetration of the mobile phone is far greater than that of the Internet in Africa, especially in rural areas, making it the most accessible communication tool, said Jon Gossier, founder and president of Appfrica, a technology company with headquarters in Uganda.

The recent completion of the first of several planned undersea cables connecting East Africa to broadband Internet has raised hopes that high-speed Web access will increase here. But Mr. Gossier said he expected mobile-phone messaging applications would be needed for several more years. The development of useful, local Web content will lag after falling Internet prices, which will quite likely take longer than a year, he said.

“I don’t think the development being done now for mobile phones is going to stop,” Mr. Gossier said, “but I think we’ll see a whole new generation of applications coming out of Africa, including mobile applications that utilize the Web.”

Tracking banana disease and educating farmers on how to protect their plantations is among several mobile phone applications being piloted in Uganda by the Grameen Foundation, a nongovernmental agency that aims to reduce poverty through microfinancing and new technology.

Grameen partnered with Uganda’s largest mobile network operator, MTN, to create AppLab Uganda, an initiative to explore ways to use mobile technologies to improve people’s lives, said the program director, Eric Cantor.

“People already have phones in their pocket, already need information, and some organizations already that provide information,” Mr. Cantor said. “We’re accelerating those connections.”

Building applications for agriculture seemed logical in a country that is predominately rural and reliant on small farms, he said.

Mr. Rutagumirwa is among several leaders in rural communities who were trained by Grameen to survey and educate neighboring farmers about the proper methods to contain banana disease. In recent years, the wide spread of two diseases has decimated banana crops in East Africa, threatening the food security and livelihood for an estimated 30 million farmers, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In Uganda alone, bananas cover about 40 percent of the country’s farmable land and are a staple food for more than 12 million people. Losses from banana disease are estimated to be $70 million to $200 million each year.

In neighboring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, another disease called banana bunchy top is also devastating banana crops. This disease has not yet been found in Uganda, but officials are on alert for it.

Once the bunchy top disease becomes established in an area, it is almost impossible to eradicate, said Idd Ramathanni, a microbiologist with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Uganda. Using mobile phones to connect the most remote farmers with scientists in Kampala vastly improves surveillance and the possibility of preventing its devastation, Mr. Ramathanni said.

“It’s better to prevent than cure a problem which is here,” he said.

David Bangirana, another village leader trained by Grameen, said he saw potential in using networks of community leaders armed with mobile phones like himself to educate and collect data in remote villages on topics beyond banana disease.

Mr. Bangirana, 60, a former teacher and village chief, wears a bright yellow T-shirt with the words “Ask Me” across the chest. His community now comes to him with questions about farming practices and health issues, and he can quickly find most answers using Google text messaging and an operator service. He said he sometimes took his phone to village primary schools to show the children the limitlessness of the information available to them.

“The use of the mobile phone,” Mr. Bangirana said, “has empowered the community to know what they never knew and ask any question concerning their surroundings.”