Brazilian researcher who helped country's grain boom wins World Food Prize
FILE PHOTO: A drone image shows a farm worker operating a combine harvester during the soybean harvest season in Brazil's southernmost state, on a farm in Lagoa dos Tres Cantos, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, April 1, 2025. REUTERS/Diego Vara./File Photo
NEW YORK - Brazilian microbiologist Mariangela Hungria, whose research has helped farmers in the country sharply boost grain production, has been named the 2025 World Food Prize Laureate, the Iowa-based foundation organizing the prize said on Tuesday.
Hungria has been a researcher for more than 40 years at Brazil's state-run agricultural center Embrapa, where she works on seeds and soil treatments that enable plants to source nutrients through soil bacteria, a particularly important development for soybean crops.
Her work helped Brazil increase soybean production from around 15 million metric tons in the 1980s to more than 170 million tons today, making the country the world's largest producer and exporter of the commodity.
"I was always interested in making viable the use of biological materials in commercial agriculture," Hungria told Reuters.
Good soybean growth requires a lot of nitrogen for the plant, but relying on nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers was expensive for Brazilian farmers and meant the country was heavily dependent on imported fertilizers, she said.
Hungria isolated strains of a soil bacteria named rhizobia and developed a way to inoculate it in the soybean seeds used in Brazil. The strains helped the soy plants extract more nitrogen from the soil, boosting their growth.
The solution has since become widespread and is used in more than 40 million hectares of Brazil's roughly 48 million hectares of soy plantations.
Hungria also developed other biological solutions, including using strains of Azospirillum brasilense bacteria to boost the size of roots on crops such as corn, allowing the plants to reach deeper for humidity or nutrients.
The use of biological products in agriculture has grown quickly in recent years, as consumers increasingly demand food produced with fewer chemicals.
The researcher will receive $500,000 for being named a Laureate. The World Food Prize was created by Norman E. Borlaug, an American agronomist who developed solutions to increase agricultural production. REUTERS
Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Straits Times
3 hours ago
- Straits Times
Extreme heat waves are getting longer and hitting the tropics hardest: Study
Indonesia and Singapore have both recorded an additional 99 extreme heat days since May 2024. ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO Four billion people experienced at least 30 additional days of extreme temperatures over the past year as a result of climate change, with nations in the tropics the most severely impacted, according to a study released on May 30. Indonesia and Singapore have both recorded an additional 99 extreme heat days since May 2024 when compared to a scenario that stripped out the impacts of global warming, researchers from London-based World Weather Attribution, US non-profit Climate Central, and the Red Cross Climate Centre found. Barbados, Haiti and a number of other Caribbean and Pacific island states and territories each had more than 120 extra hot days. Scientists defined extreme heat days as instances when daily temperatures were above 90 per cent of the historical average for a given location, aiming to gain better insight into conditions experienced locally rather than by making comparisons to worldwide averages. Last year (2024) was the hottest ever recorded, and the period studied in the report covered several severe heat waves, including in the southwest US last June, across southern Europe the following month, and through central Asia in March 2025. Periods of extreme heat disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, including older adults, low-income communities and pregnant people, the study said. There are frequently also negative effects on agricultural productivity, water availability and energy infrastructure. Of the 247 countries and territories analysed in the study, those with the highest number of additional extreme heat days were overwhelmingly in regions closest to the equator. 'Temperatures are less variable in the tropics than in the mid-latitudes, which means that the climate change trend is emerging more clearly in tropical regions,' said Dr Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London and member of the World Weather Attribution group. That means those regions will more likely experience extreme heat, she said. The World Weather Attribution group is an international scientific collaboration focused on finding out to what degree climate change is to blame for extreme weather events. Extreme heat has one of the strongest links to climate change. Small island states are among the most exposed to and least prepared for climate risks, and saw the starkest increase in extreme heat days during the period studied. That's because 'the oceans surrounding them tend to hold heat for a long time, keeping temperatures higher in what would previously have been cooler months,' Dr Barnes said. BLOOMBERG Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
Straits Times
2 days ago
- Straits Times
China launches space probe seeking asteroid samples
A Long March-3B rocket carrying the Tianwen-2 probe blasted off from the Xichang launch site in south-western Sichuan province. PHOTO: REUTERS BEIJING - China on May 29 launched a space probe on the country's first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and bring them home for research, the Xinhua state news agency reported. Beijing has ploughed billions of dollars into its space programme in recent years in an effort to achieve what President Xi Jinping describes as the country's 'space dream'. It has built a space station orbiting the Earth and plans to run a crewed mission to the Moon this decade ahead of establishing a permanent base there. A Long March-3B rocket carrying the Tianwen-2 probe blasted off from the Xichang launch site in south-western Sichuan province at 1.31 am. About 18 minutes later, the Tianwen-2 probe was sent into a transfer orbit from Earth to the asteroid 2016HO3, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said, according to Xinhua. 'The spacecraft unfolded its solar panels smoothly, and the CNSA declared the launch a success,' the news agency wrote. Tianwen-2 is tasked with collecting samples from the near-Earth asteroid 2016HO3, and exploring the comet 311P, according to the country's space agency. Discovered by scientists in Hawaii in 2016, the asteroid is roughly 40m to 100m in diameter and orbits relatively close to Earth. It is a 'living fossil' consisting of ancient materials that can help scientists understand how the early solar system formed, Xinhua reported this week. The comet, meanwhile, orbits between Mars and Jupiter and is alluring to researchers because it exhibits some features more commonly associated with asteroids. The Tianwen-2 mission is expected to last around a decade. China's space programme is the third to put humans in orbit – after the United States and the Soviet Union – and has also landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon. Its space station, Tiangong – whose name means 'celestial palace' in Chinese – is the jewel in its crown. In April, China sent three astronauts to Tiangong for a six-month stint as part of the Shenzhou-20 mission. AFP Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Straits Times
2 days ago
- Straits Times
China launches mission to retrieve asteroid samples
WASHINGTON - China on Wednesday embarked on its first mission to retrieve samples from a nearby asteroid with the nighttime launch of its Tianwen-2 spacecraft, a robotic probe that could make the fast-growing space power the third nation to fetch pristine asteroid rocks. China's Long March 3B rocket lifted off around 1:31 a.m. local time from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center carrying the Tianwen-2 spacecraft, which over the next year will approach the small near-Earth asteroid named 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, some 10 million miles away. Chinese state media Xinhua confirmed the launch of Tianwen-2 and dubbed it a "complete success." Tianwen-2 is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid in July 2026 and shoot a capsule packed with rocks back to Earth for a landing in November 2027. The mission is the latest example of China's swiftly expanding space programs, a streak of cosmic achievements in recent years that includes landing robots on the far side of the moon, running its own national space station in orbit and investing heavily in plans to send humans to the lunar surface by 2030. Japan's Hayabusa that fetched samples from a small asteroid in 2010 marked the world's first such mission. Japan did it again in 2019 with its Ryugu mission, followed by the first U.S. asteroid retrieval mission, OSIRIS-REx, that brought back samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2020. Kamoʻoalewa, the target asteroid for Tianwen-2, is known as a quasi-satellite of Earth, a close celestial neighbor that has orbited the sun for roughly a century, according to NASA. Its size is anywhere between 120 feet (40 meters) and 300 feet (100 meters). REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
