The 'Oscar' of food prizes goes to a Brazilian who harnessed the power of bacteria

The victor of this year's World Food Prize, Mariangela Hungria, showed however microbes could bring a higher soybean output — turning Brazil into a soybean superpower. Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Bloomberg hide caption

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Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Bloomberg

Mariangela Hungria, a microbiologist successful Brazil, spent decades looking for bacteria successful the ungraded that could enactment similar fertilizer, boosting farmers' harvests. But she faced a batch of skepticism.

"When I started my career, everybody was like, 'You're crazy! You volition ne'er succeed. This volition ne'er beryllium possible,'" she recalls.

Today, her enactment was rewarded with the World Food Prize, which recognizes advances successful agriculture and nutrition. Bestowed by the World Food Prize Foundation since 1987, it comes with a currency grant of $500,000.

Hungria has spent her full vocation arsenic a idiosyncratic with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), a storied instauration that's wide credited with turning Brazil into an cultivation superpower. Fifty years ago, Brazil was a nett importer of food. Today, it's the world's biggest exporter of soybeans and respective different large crops. Brazil has surpassed the U.S. to go the person successful satisfying China's appetite for soybeans.

Inspired by her grandmother

Hungria's emotion of subject was kindled successful childhood, she says, acknowledgment to a "magical grandmother" who taught her astir backyard plants and the ungraded that nourished them.

"One day, it was a holiday, she gave maine 1 of her books to read. It was a publication astir the beingness of microbiologists," Hungria recalls. She spent that full nighttime speechmaking astir bacteria and fungi. The adjacent morning, she announced to her household that she, too, would go a microbiologist.

She got her Ph.D. from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and went to enactment for EMBRAPA successful 1982. She followed successful the footsteps of different pioneer of Brazilian science, Johanna Döbereiner, who had begun hunting for microbes that could boost the productivity of crops.

Hungria isolated utile strains of bacteria called rhizobia which inhabit nodules connected soybean roots, seizure nitrogen from the aerial and person it into a signifier that feeds the plant. She besides documented benefits from a strain of different ungraded microbe, Azospirillum, which releases hormones that stimulate the maturation of roots, allowing plants similar corn, wheat and pasture grasses to seizure nutrients much efficiently.

"She's a phenomenal scientist. A relation exemplary for galore people, including myself," says Leo Bortolon, a ungraded idiosyncratic from Brazil who's present a researcher astatine North Dakota State University. According to Bortolon, astir seeds of large crops similar soybeans oregon maize successful Brazil present are coated with microorganisms earlier planting.

A bacterial boon

There's inactive some debate astir however effectual these bacteria are nether antithetic ungraded and clime conditions. But successful Brazil, astatine least, studies person shown that the microbes let farmers to get by with utilizing little chemic fertilizer, redeeming wealth and reducing burdens connected the environment.

Microbial treatments are much wide utilized successful Brazil, compared to the U.S., Bortolon says, due to the fact that farmers successful Brazil person greater assurance successful them. They've been studied much intensively successful the ungraded and clime conditions of Brazil, and the authorities lone allows companies to merchantability microbial products if there's coagulated grounds that they work.

"Mariangela played a relation successful that, however to modulate the market," Bortolon says.

Hungria is the 2nd researcher from EMBRAPA to person the World Food Prize. The erstwhile winner, Edson Lobato, pioneered ways to turn crops successful a immense portion of grasslands and scattered trees called the Cerrado.

That feat gave EMPRAPA an astir mythic presumption successful Brazil. For galore people, particularly of an older generation, "EMBRAPA is this heroic instauration that conquered the chaotic lands of the interior, made them productive, portion of this nation-building effort," says Ryan Nehring, from the International Food Policy Research Institute successful Washington, D.C.

Until astir 50 years ago, the Cerrado was considered unsuitable for crops. The ungraded was excessively acidic. But EMBRAPA's scientists showed farmers however to adhd lime and different materials to the ungraded and crook that onshore into productive soybean fields. Brazil's farmers seized the accidental to turn crops connected an unprecedented scale.

The government's policies favored farmers who already were successful, allowing large farmers to get adjacent bigger. The cultivation roar "is predicated connected utmost inequality," Nehring says. Some farms are truthful ample that it tin instrumentality 4 oregon 5 days to thrust from 1 broadside to the other.

Many successful Brazil observe that accomplishment. Nehring recalls a researcher astatine EMBRAPA telling him that "'what took you guys [in the U.S.] 200 years to do' —- meaning industrialized agriculture —- 'took america little than 50.'"

A imaginativeness for the future

Others astatine EMBRAPA, however, including Mariangela Hungria, are taking a 2nd look astatine that legacy. Brazil's agriculture successful the future, they say, should look antithetic from its past. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known to astir simply arsenic Lula, has pushed EMBRAPA to absorption much connected reducing poorness among Brazil's agrarian poor, for instance.  

Hungria wants to spot women taking a bigger role. Farming has been shaped by a benignant of masculine attitude, she says: claiming much land, competing to beryllium "the victor of production."

Women are much apt to displacement the absorption of farming toward biology sustainability, Hungria says. Caring for onshore that's already been claimed alternatively than trying to wide more. Focusing not conscionable connected the size of the harvest but connected which crops present amended nutrition.

That'll beryllium portion of her speech, she says, erstwhile she formally accepts the World Food Prize aboriginal this year. . And Hungria says she'll usage the currency she has won to money a caller grant that volition admit women who are moving successful agriculture, microbiology, communications oregon for the payment of radical with peculiar needs.