Amit Roy arms farmers with fertilizer
Amit Roy was smiling on a cover of Alabama-based Thicket magazine last summer next to a headline proclaiming: “This Man Could End World Hunger.”
An article in India Abroad in January said Roy’s “contributions toward helping alleviate world hunger and poverty by improving sustainable agricultural productivity in the developing world are immense.”
Yet, this man quietly fighting the war on hunger usually doesn’t make front-page news. His barracks are off the beaten track in Muscle Shoals, Ala., where his ammunition for the fight — fertilizer — is developed. In fact, more than 70 percent of all fertilizers available in the world today were developed there.
For some 220 days a year, Roy, MS ChE 71, PhD ChE 76, is in the trenches in some of the hungriest places on Earth as president and CEO of the International Fertilizer Development Center.
“Synthetic fertilizers have been credited with keeping alive almost half the people on Earth,” Roy said. “The entire research related to fertilizers was done in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, by the Tennessee Valley Authority starting after the second World War. At the world summit in Rome in 1974, the United States government, the Canadians and Australians said this know-how will be made available to developing countries so that they can produce their own requirements for food, fiber and feed. And that was the beginning of it.”
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter, Cls 46, transformed IFDC from a private, nonprofit entity to a public international organization, which allows it the same immunities and privileges as the World Bank and United Nations. Researchers from around the globe are able to work in the Muscle Shoals labs on tax-free diplomatic visas.
“Now we get funding from many, many countries and multilateral agencies. Our focus still remains fertilizer, but it has expanded into how to improve soil productivity, cope with the changing scenario in terms of diet, policies and environment and advise governments in developing countries,” Roy said.
The IFDC operates with a $60 million budget and 700 employees in 22 offices around the world. But it was in his native India where Roy first witnessed the effects of hunger.
“The shortage of food was a primary issue for many people, and I became very interested in the whole issue of food production,” said Roy, who earned his undergraduate degree at the India Institute of Technology.
He learned about IFDC while researching fertilizers at Georgia Tech and joined the organization in 1978. Promoted to president in 1992, Roy now also is the father of a Tech alumnus, Auroop Roy, BME 08.
While research is still conducted in Muscle Shoals, the IFDC this year launched a virtual lab to connect the best minds around the world.
“The challenge going forward will be how to produce plant-responsive fertilizers and use them in an efficient way without degrading the environment,” Roy said. “We have launched a research initiative for the next generation of fertilizers, which will be less fossil fuel dependent. It will require global intellect, people working around the world to come together to find a solution.”
Education constitutes a large part of the work that takes Roy around the globe, including more than half a dozen trips annually to Africa, “which is a vast continent with enormous challenges yet huge potential,” he said.
“The whole idea is how to improve production on existing land,” Roy said. “What is happening in Africa particularly is a significant amount of what we call slash-and-burn technology. If you don’t teach the farmers to farm on the existing land, essentially they’re going to go to new land, they’re going to cut down the trees, burn the trees down, get all the nutrients out by farming two or three years, then go to a new area.”
Roy makes frequent trips to Bangladesh and already this year has traveled to the densely populated country of 145 million people to meet with government officials.
“The main cereal crop that the Bangladeshis eat is rice. Rice requires a significant amount of nitrogen fertilizers for its growth. It’s very difficult for the plants to naturally capture nitrogen from the air, so you have to produce synthetic nitrogen and feed it to them. The fertilizer that is most commonly used for the production of rice is called urea, a chemical compound that is produced by converting ammonia combined with carbon dioxide. One metric ton of urea requires an energy equivalent to four barrels of oil,” he said.
“The problem with urea is it is highly soluble, it breaks down in soil very rapidly. When the farmers apply three bags of urea, only one bag is effective, two bags are lost. This is a huge economic loss and an environmental problem. We now have a technology where you can take urea and make it into large granules and place it under the soil and it can double the efficiency.
“There are about 1.6 million hectares of land in Bangladesh that are under this technology, and the farmers are using 40 percent less urea. They’re still getting 20 percent more product out of their soil so the government is very excited,” said Roy, who is helping spread the adoption of urea granules throughout Bangladesh as well as Africa.
“When you go to the poorer countries, whether it’s in Asia or Africa, and you see the starvation, particularly the children, who from morning till evening when they go to bed they’re looking for food, it certainly is a very sobering experience. It makes you get up and gives you the ambition to solve these problems.”
He said issues of food production and access to food are moving to the forefront.
“Coming up with new varieties of seed and management to cope with climate changes is going to be the next challenge, not only for the United States but all over the world,” Roy said.
Add alternative fuels to the list.
“The United States still exports quite a bit of cereals, but over the last three years, quite a lot of the surplus, of corn particularly, has been diverted to biofuel. So the issue becomes a double-edged sword. On one side you are coping with the high price for oil by taking food crops like corn and converting that into biofuel. Then the price of food goes up,” he said.
“One hectare of corn that is produced in Africa can feed a person for nearly one year. But the same corn, if it was converted to biofuel, can probably give you one or one and a half tanks of gasoline for a big SUV. Those are the debates that are going on right now in the development community. How much of the food crop can you divert for biofuel?”
Internationally over the last couple of years, prices of food, energy and fertilizers have shot up, according to the IFDC, and added 115 million people to the 800 million already living in extreme poverty around the globe.
Roy remembers the work of Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for introducing high-yielding varieties of wheat to India and Pakistan in the 1960s, for inspiration. Borlaug served on the IFDC board for a decade, and he and Roy spoke often. Borlaug died in September.
“Certainly he has left a lasting impression in terms of what is possible. He was probably credited for saving more lives than anybody else,” Roy said. “Yet he was a humble man. He was a man who could go out to the fields to talk to the farmers one day and the next day be interacting with the heads of state.”
That sounds very much like Roy himself.
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