Brazilian microbiologist wins 2025 World Food Prize

A Brazilian soil microbiologist credited with improving crop yields, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers, and helping her country become a breadbasket for the world has won the 2025 World Food Prize. Mariangela Hungria has developed dozens of biological seed and soil treatments that help crops source nutrients through soil bacteria in environmentally sustainable ways. For more than 40 years, she has worked with Embrapa, the state-run Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, helping farmers substitute nitrogen-based fertilizers with microbial products that are cheaper and just as effective. The prestigious World Food Prize is awarded annually to an individual or individuals whose work has improved the quality, quantity, or availability of food worldwide. Known as the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture, it also comes with $500,000 for Hungria to continue her research. “I still cannot believe it,” Hungria, who is based in São Paulo, told Devex in an interview. “When I first got the call … I was so excited because I thought that I would have an opportunity to talk in the [World Food Prize’s annual conference]. Then they called me and I was saying, ‘Oh, thank you very much, I’m going to talk about biologicals and this and that.’ And then they said, ‘Well, you can talk, but it’s just that you won.’” Hungria was an early advocate for biological nitrogen fixation, the process by which crops form a symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria that provide nitrogen, a nutrient that is essential for plant growth. In Brazil, the natural products she has created are estimated to have been used across more than 40 million hectares, saving farmers up to $25 billion annually in input costs while avoiding more than 230 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per year, according to the World Food Prize. Her work has improved yields of wheat, maize, rice, common beans, and soybeans. Today, Brazil is the world’s biggest soybean producer and exporter. In Hungria’s four decades with Embrapa, national soybean production surged from 15 million tons in 1979 to a projected 173 million tons for the upcoming harvest. Her products are applied throughout South America and elsewhere. Channeling smallholder farmers The announcement was made Tuesday at a ceremony at the World Food Prize’s headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. In a statement, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds compared Hungria to Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist from Iowa who founded the prize. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his pioneering work improving crop yields, which substantially increased food production and is known as the Green Revolution. “As an industrial pioneer and mother, Dr. Hungria also serves as an inspiring example for women researchers seeking to embody both roles,” Reynolds said. “Her discoveries and developments have launched Brazil to become a global breadbasket.” Last year’s prize recipients were Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin, two crop scientists known as the fathers of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an arctic facility that safeguards the world’s seed varieties to protect global food security. Past recipients include African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Hungria calls replacing the use of chemical inputs with biological ones in agriculture “the fight of my life.” She is a prolific researcher and writer, having published more than 500 pieces. But the most rewarding thing for her, she told Devex, is meeting with smallholder farmers, listening to their needs, and teaching them about new technologies. She said she tries to put herself in the shoes of farmers who are reluctant to switch to non-chemical fertilizers because that often comes with lower yields. “If I say that [biological inputs are] the best thing in the world, but that his yield, his production is going to be lower, he’ll not accept that because he needs this money,” she said. “So what I dedicated my life to was to really have high yields to have a highly competitive agriculture that produces equally or higher than using chemicals,” she continued. “That's economically feasible for the farmer, and it's much, much better for the environment.” ‘Micro Green Revolution’ Hungria wanted to go into the sciences since she was a child. Her grandmother, a science teacher, gave Hungria her first book on microbiologists when she was 8 years old. She decided early on to study agronomy. A single mother of two daughters, one with special needs, Hungria said she often faced discrimination in a field dominated by men. The early years of her scientific career in the 1970s were dominated by Borlaug’s Green Revolution and its focus on chemical fertilizers to improve yields. Hardly anyone was doing research on microbiology as a solution for soil fertility. But Hungria thought microbes could be equally efficient as fertilizers — not to mention much more environmentally friendly. She started out by studying a type of bacteria called rhizobia and found that she could increase yields by up to 8% compared to the use of synthetic fertilizers by applying the rhizobia strain to soybeans through an inoculant — a kind of beneficial microorganism introduced into soil or onto plants to improve their health and yield. She was also behind the release of commercial strains of Azospirillum brasilense, a bacterium that boosts the uptake of nitrogen and release of phytohormones. Combining both A. brasilense and rhizobia could double the yield increase in common beans and soybeans, her research found. “Because we work with microorganisms in these biological products, we said we'll do this ‘micro Green Revolution,’ following the ideas of Borlaug but now in a biological way,” explained Hungria, who is also a professor at the State University of Londrina in Brazil's soybean-producing Paraná state. “Now, finally, the rates of growth of using biologicals are going much, much faster than the chemicals.” “I'm not against the chemicals,” she added. “I'm against the use of chemicals where you have possibilities of changing to biologicals.” Her goal is to improve yields in large-scale agriculture with the lowest possible use of chemical fertilizers. Adoption of environmentally-friendly farming practices is even more important in the context of climate change, she said. Agriculture is among the sectors most affected by droughts, floods, and biodiversity loss — and industrial agriculture, which relies heavily on the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, exacerbates climate change. Agriculture alone is responsible for some 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, Hungria has focused her work on restoring degraded pastureland. Up to 40% of the world’s land is degraded, according to the United Nations, meaning its biological or economic productivity has been reduced. Hungria developed the first microbial inoculant for grass pastures, which allowed degraded pastures to again be used for agriculture, and also provides more and better food for cattle. “In a few years, we can double the production of Brazil without cutting one tree, just by occupying land that was once covered with the degraded pasture,” she said. “Scientifically, this is my goal for the rest of my career — to work with the recovery of degraded pastures through the use of biologicals.” “As an agronomist and human, my goal is really to help finish food insecurity,” she said. Agronomist, woman, and mother Hungria will be honored in a ceremony in October in Des Moines during the Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, a three-day gathering dedicated to exploring solutions to food insecurity and hunger. Winning the World Food Prize, she said, is a kind of honor for all women in agriculture. “Women are very responsible for agriculture,” she said. “In many countries, they are the ones that produce the food. They are keeping seeds. They organize family and community meals. If it was not for women, food insecurity would be much, much worse.” “And so, I hope — as an agronomist and woman and mother — I can be an inspiration to girls and mothers and women, and show how important they are for food security.”