“Soil is a Bank Account”

Soil scientist Rattan Lal wins World Food Prize 2020, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

- Rattan Lal

A midst the other-wise grim news of the virus pandemic and clashes on the Indo-china border, what has gone unnoticed is that the World Food Prize 2020, equivalent to a Nobel Prize in the field of soil science and agriculture, has been won by a person of Indian origin – 75-year-old soil scientist Dr. Rattan Lal. An alumnus of Punjab Agricultural University, he is presently a professor of soil science at Ohio State University in the US and the founding director of the university’s carbon Management and Sequestration centre. Dr. Lal’s research in the 1990s revealed that restoring degraded soils through increasing soil carbon and organic matter not only improved soil health, but helped combat rising carbon dioxide levels in the air by sequestering atmospheric carbon.