2022 Borlaug Field Award Ceremony
Mahalingam Govindaraj
Mahalingam Govindaraj, Senior Scientist for Crop Development with HarvestPlus at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, received the 2022 Norman E. Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by The Rockefeller Foundation. He is recognized for his outstanding leadership in mainstreaming biofortified crops, particularly pearl millet, in India and Africa. For more than a decade, he has directed the development and dissemination of high-yielding, high-iron and high-zinc pearl millet varieties which have contributed to better nutrition for thousands of farmers and their communities.
As a scientist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) starting in 2011, Govindaraj defined a strategy for biofortification of pearl millet with high iron and zinc content and dissemination of these high-yielding, drought-tolerant varieties to farmers. Biofortification is the process of increasing the micronutrient content of a crop through selective breeding, and has become a keystone strategy for reducing vitamin and mineral deficiencies in low- and middle-income countries. Pearl millet is a climate-resilient staple food crop that grows in dry regions on marginally productive land, and as such is most often cultivated by smallholder farmers and accessible to those with low income. Having come from a farming background, Govindaraj saw that biofortification of pearl millet could have a strong positive impact on the nutrition and health of rural communities.