Soil scientist A. Colin McClung, M.S. '49, Ph.D. '50, center, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University and a 2006 World Food Prize laureate, was honored at Cornell, March 1, for his contributions to the conversion of the Brazilian Cerrado, an area the size of 12 U.S. Midwestern states, from wasteland into highly productive cropland. Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences, left, and Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy and the 2001 World Food Prize laureate, right, were among those who spoke at the event.

McClung went to Brazil in 1956 to study problems with coffee production for the David and Nelson Rockefeller-funded International Basic Economic Corporation Research Institute. Once there, he discovered the much larger problem of the 120 million-hectare campos cerrados, meaning "closed land." Through methodical experimentation, McClung soon determined the remedies needed to counteract the acidity and high aluminum levels that made the soil inhospitable to agriculture.

McClung received the World Food Prize along with Brazilian soil scientist Edson Lobato and Alysson Paolinelli, a former minister of agriculture in Brazil, who built on his work in subsequent decades to further the revolutionary transformation of the Cerrado into a major producer of the world's soybean and other food crops.