Brazilian researcher who helped country's grain boom wins World Food Prize

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.