This year?s World Food Prize Laureate was recently recognized on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Iowa Senator Charles Grassley gave praise Monday to Dr. Rattan Lal, a native of India and a citizen of the United States, who was announced as the 2020 World Food Prize winner last week. Grassley says the award is often called the Nobel Prize for agriculture.
?The World Food Prize is awarded for exceptional achievements that advance human development by increasing the quantity, quality, availability of or access to food,? Grassley said. ?The award was created by Iowan Dr. Norman Borlaug who is credited with saving more lives than any other person who ever lived through his pioneering work in developing new, more productive plant varieties ? particularly plant varieties free of disease.?
Grassley says the Green Revolution sparked by Dr. Borlaug made it possible for India to feed its people. Dr. Lal?s work in agriculture has benefited more than 500 million small older farmers, improved the food security and livelihoods of more than two billion people, and saved hundreds of millions of hectares of natural tropical ecosystems.
?Now, Dr. Lal ? also from India ? is being recognized for his work, which will be of interest to Iowans and others around the world,? said Grassley. ?As (Dr. Lal) says, ?Achieving hunger-free humanity, soil degradation neutrality, negative emission farming and pollutant-free water are among principal challenges which can never be ignored. Sustainable management of soil and agriculture is also essential to keeping global temperatures within the safe range and restoring the environment.??
Dr. Rattan Lal helped develop and mainstream a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that restores and conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change, according to World Food Prize President Barbara Stinson. Dr. Lal will receive the prize for his work on soil health at the annual ceremony in Des Moines in October.
For more information on Dr. Rattan Lal?s background, visit worldfoodprize.org/2020laureate.
