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Nazeer Ahmad was born on January 27th 1932 in Dundee, Guyana. As
a child, he helped his father on the family’s subsistence farm.
He attended the Novar Canadian Mission School and Berbice High
School. After only three years in high school, he wrote the
Cambridge School Certificate and was accepted at the Imperial
College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA) in Trinidad.
Though he wanted to study medicine, he welcomed the offer of a
government scholarship to study at ICTA graduating with the
Diploma in Agriculture (1951) and Postgraduate Associateship
(1952). He completed a master’s degree at the University of
British Columbia, Canada (1955) and later his doctorate in soil
science from Nottingham University, U.K. in 1957.
Ahmad was then appointed Head of the Division of Agricultural
Chemistry in Guyana. He organised a country-wide soil and land
use study to improve Guyana’s agricultural productivity and
later he did similar surveys throughout the Commonwealth
Caribbean. His study of the efficiency of nitrogen uptake from
artificial fertilizers in crop plants confirmed the importance
of nitrogen in Caribbean soils and promoted the planting of
leguminous plants for soil enrichment.
His pioneering work on the properties of clay soils gained him
international recognition. He served as a consultant on soil and
land use problems for many international agencies in almost
every developing country in the world. His research was
published in the definitive book “Vertisols and Technologies for
their management” and in over 100 refereed publications.
From 1962 he provided 35 years service to the University of the
West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine. He established new soil
science courses in the Faculty of Agriculture, built
well-equipped soil science laboratories and trained over 90
postgraduate students. He was appointed Fulbright Professor of
Tropical Soil Science at the University of Illinois, USA (1982)
and was named Professor Emeritus of Soil Science at UWI (1996).
Ahmad was Director of the National Agricultural Research
Institute, Guyana (1995-2000) and served the International Board
for Soil Research and Management and the International Society
of Soil Science. In 1995, he became the first Caribbean
scientist to receive the International Institute for
Co-operation in Agriculture’s Gold Medal in Agriculture for his
outstanding research on the soils of Latin America and the
Caribbean. Though retired, he is still active as an
international consultant in soil science.
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