SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL — Mariangela Hungria, PhD, a scientist whose discoveries helped Brazil become a global agricultural powerhouse, has been named the 2025 World Food Prize Laureate. She will receive a $500,000 award for her work to harness biological processes to sustainably improve crop nutrition, yields and productivity.

Hungria, a microbiologist from São Paulo, has developed dozens of biological seed and soil treatments that help crops source nutrients through soil bacteria, significantly increasing yields of major crops while also reducing the need for synthetic fertilizer. Her products are estimated to have been used across more than 40 million hectares in Brazil, saving farmers up to $40 billion a year in input costs while avoiding more than 180 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions per year.

Her work has helped improve yields of wheat, maize, rice, common beans, and other major crops, including soybean, which is now Brazil’s top agricultural export. Over her 40-year career with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), national soybean production increased from 15 million tonnes in 1979 to an anticipated 173 million tonnes in the coming harvest.

The announcement of this year’s World Food Prize, the premier international award for food and agriculture, was made at the organization’s international headquarters, the Norman E. Borlaug Hall of Laureates. The event was presided over by Iowa Governor the Honorable Kim Reynolds.  

“Dr. Hungria’s journey shows she is a scientist of great perseverance and vision — traits she shares with Iowa’s own Dr. Norman Borlaug, founder of the World Food Prize and father of the Green Revolution,” Reynolds said. “As an industrial pioneer and mother, Dr. Hungria also serves as an inspiring example for women researchers seeking to embody both roles. Her discoveries and developments have launched Brazil to become a global breadbasket. The World Food Prize champions those whose courage and innovation transform our world, and I congratulate Dr. Hungria for receiving this recognition.”

Under the mentorship of Johanna Döbereiner, Hungria was an early proponent of biological nitrogen fixation, the process in which crops form a mutually beneficial association with soil bacteria that provides nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth. At the outset of her career, very little research existed on microbiology as a solution for soil fertility.

She began by studying rhizobia, a type of bacteria that interacts with the roots of legume plants to provide nitrogen in exchange for energy. She found that applying this strain to soybeans through an inoculant every year could increase yields by up to 8% compared to the use of synthetic fertilizer.

She was also the first to isolate strains of the bacterium Azospirillum brasilense that could improve the uptake of nitrogen and phytohormones. Her research showed that combining and applying both A. brasilense and rhizobia could double the yield increase in common beans and soybeans. Today, more than 70 million doses of combined inoculants are sold and applied across an estimated 15 million hectares in Brazil each year.