Dr. Rattan Lal, native of India and a citizen of the United States, will receive the 2020 World Food Prize for developing and mainstreaming a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that restores and conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change.
Over his career spanning more than five decades and four continents, Dr. Lal has promoted innovative soil-saving techniques benefiting the livelihoods of more than 500 million smallholder farmers, improving the food and nutritional security of more than two billion people and saving hundreds of millions of hectares of natural tropical ecosystems.
Biography
Dr. Lal serves as Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science and founding Director of the Carbon Management & Sequestration Center at The Ohio State University (OSU). From his humble beginnings as a refugee growing up on a small subsistence farm in India, his determination to learn and succeed in school propelled him to become one of the world’s foremost soil scientists. His pioneering research on the restoration of soil health in Africa, Asia and Latin America led to revelations that impacted agricultural yields, natural resource conservation and climate change mitigation. The agricultural practices Lal advocated are now at the heart of efforts to improve agriculture systems in the tropics and globally.
Lal’s soil-centric approach is based on the premise that “the health of soil, plants, animals, people and the environment is one and indivisible.” His research shows that growing crops on healthy soils produces more from less: more food from less land area, less use of agrochemicals, less tillage, less water and less energy. As soils also provide essential environmental services such as retaining rainwater, filtering pollutants and providing habitat for all manner of organisms, it is all the more important for societies to manage soils sustainably.
“I believe soil is a living thing. That’s what soil health means, soil is life. Every living thing has rights. Therefore, soil also has rights,” Lal said. “As long as you are consuming the natural resources – food, water, elements – coming from the soil, you owe it to soil to put something back, to give something back, whatever you can.”
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