Sometimes human progress comes in a flash, with a brilliant breakthrough by an individual genius. More often, it comes incrementally over decades with contributions from more than one individual.

The World Food Prize Foundation this year found a way to honor the latter kind of progress. Its 2006 prize will be shared by three men whose work has spanned a half-century.

Together, and with the efforts of many others as well, they are said to have opened more new land to farming than has occurred at any time since settlement of the American Midwest more than a hundred years ago.

They made farming possible in the previously barren Cerrado high plains of Brazil, an area three times the size of Texas.

"It's an enormous accomplishment that no one person could have done," said foundation president Kenneth Quinn.

The opening of the Cerrado raised the standard of living in Brazil and may have shown the way to farm millions more unproductive acres elsewhere in South America and in Africa. "Hundreds of millions of people will benefit from this work," said Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Food Prize founder Norman Borlaug in a press release.

The prize will go to:

• A. Colin McClung, an American soil scientist whose studies in the 1950s demonstrated how to neutralize the acidity and toxic levels of aluminum in Cerrado soil.

• Alysson Paolinelli, who served as both state and national secretary of agriculture in Brazil and was instrumental in establishing EMBRAPA, an agricultural research center, and initiating a program for agricultural and rural development in the Cerrado.

• Edson Lobato, a Brazilian agronomist who worked at EMBRAPA, carried forward the work of McClung and collaborated in bringing new technologies to farmers to transform the region.

This year's Food Prize may not be without controversy. The opening of the Cerrado brought major new competition for American soybean producers, and its conversion to high-yield agriculture threatens the existence of a unique ecosystem.

The Cerrado is a savanna with wildlife that includes the giant anteater and jaguar and an estimated 10,000 plant species, a large share of them exclusive to the region. International environmental organizations have listed the Cerrado as a hot spot for threatened loss of biodiversity, saying the native ecosystem could disappear by about 2030.

In that respect, the Cerrado might be comparable to the tallgrass prairie of the Midwest, a magnificent ecosystem that all but disappeared under the plow.

The world must encourage Brazil to do a better job than the United States did in setting aside large tracts of its virgin lands to preserve the original flora and fauna.

Meanwhile, it's entirely fitting to celebrate the (literally) groundbreaking work of McClung, Paolinelli and Lobato. Whenever barren land becomes productive, the human condition improves. Those who enable it deserve humanity's applause.