USA Today
10-18-06
World Food Prize Will Honor A Dramatic Transformation; Brazil's Cerrado Was
by: Elizabeth Weise
This year's World Food Prize goes to three scientists who helped transform the
infertile Brazilian Cerrado, high plains covering an area the size of Western
Europe, into highly productive cropland.
The $250,000 prize, often dubbed "the Nobel Prize of agriculture," will be
presented Thursday. It was founded by Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1970 and known as the father of the Green Revolution, a series of
agricultural advances that began in the 1940s. It is given for achievements that
significantly increase the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.
This is the first time since the prize was created 20 years ago that there are three
recipients: American agronomist A. Colin McClung, and Brazilian agronomists
Alysson Paolinelli and Edson Lobato.
The conversion of Brazil's Cerrado is considered a milestone of agricultural
science and the reason Brazil's soybean production in the spring of 2006 was
equal to 66% of U.S. 2005 production, says Robert Wisner, an agricultural
economist at Iowa State University.
Since 1970, more than 50% of the Cerrado's 1.2 million square miles have been
turned into pasture and agricultural land, according to the journal Conservation
Biology.
Historically the Cerrado consisted of grasslands and scrublands. Its soils are
millions of years old and so leached out that they were too acidic and nutrientpoor to be able to support crops at all.
In the 1950s, McClung looked at ways to supplement the soil and counteract the
aluminum toxicity caused by its high acid levels. McClung showed that by adding
lime, micronutrients and fertilizer, the Cerrado, blessed with plentiful rainfall and
generally flat ground, could yield 200 to 300 times more crops than it was
producing.
But even into the 1970s, the area had no roads or government support for
agriculture. Enter Paolinelli, secretary of agriculture in the Brazilian state of Minas
Gerais, who began to institute credit and development programs to help turn the
savanna into farms. He continued the work when he became Brazil's minister of
agriculture in 1974.
Finally, over the course of 30 years as an agricultural engineer, Lobato worked
with Cerrado's microbiology and soil management to help increase soil quality
and further increase yields.
Brazil's agricultural production more than tripled between 1970 to 2000. "The
ability to take such a large area that wasn't being used to produce food can't be
discounted with another 3 billion people coming to the planet in the next 40
years," says World Food Prize president Kenneth Quinn. "We're about feeding
the world."
However, the story of the Brazilian Cerrado is not without controversy. The area
is mostly used to grow soybeans and to graze cattle. The soybeans are used for
edible oil and animal feed, most of which is exported to Europe for cattle.
Critics contend that turning a richly biodiverse ecosystem into endless soybean
fields to feed cows is a highly inefficient form of food production that does not
serve the goal of ending hunger.
"They got this prize because they figured out how to crack the agricultural puzzle
of an area that's very infertile. In that respect my hat's off to them," says Robert
Jackson, professor of biology at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
"But this is not about feeding people, it's about money. There are a handful of
people, mostly large landowners, who are getting really rich."