On October 16, the United Nations marks World Food Day, designed to call attention to efforts to combat hunger and malnutrition around the globe. Today on New American Voices, we introduce one of the leaders of this effort -- Pedro Sanchez, a Cuban-American who is this year?s recipient of the quarter-million-dollar World Food Prize. The privately-funded award honors Mr. Sanchez?s work in restoring fertility and productivity to land that was considered too poor for agriculture.
Pedro Sanchez became a refugee in the United States in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro came to power in his native Cuba. At the time, he was a sophomore at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. But his first memory of this country dates back to a much different time, when he was seven years old.
Pedro Sanchez?s father owned a farm and a fertilizer business near Havana, and sent his son to the United States to study agriculture when the young man was 18. But barely a year later, Fidel Castro staged his communist revolution, and the Sanchez family?s fortunes changed drastically. In 1960 the family?s fertilizer factory was confiscated, and not long after the family went into exile in Florida. For Pedro Sanchez, it meant a complete change in what he planned to do with his life.
But first, Pedro Sanchez had to complete his education. His father, having lost his livelihood in Cuba, was no longer able to support him. So Mr. Sanchez got a scholarship, joined a fraternity where he washed dishes in return for free food, and found jobs cleaning a laundromat and teaching Spanish. He says he didn?t resent the abrupt reversal in his circumstances.
Indeed, Mr. Sanchez says he never faced any discrimination in this country because of his name or his national origin. The only problem, he recalls, was that he spoke English with a heavy Spanish accent, and he had trouble losing it because he spent so much time socializing with other Latino students at the university.
With the possibility of returning to Cuba gone, Pedro Sanchez says he decided to become an American.
After receiving his bachelor?s and master?s degrees and his doctorate from Cornell University, Pedro Sanchez went on to become a renowned soil specialist. As part of a North Carolina State University research team, he introduced a new ?miracle rice? into Peru that made the country self-sufficient in rice production for the first time. Working in Brazil, he headed a successful effort to turn thirty million hectares of what was considered useless tropical soils into productive agricultural land. And in the 1990s, as the director of the Kenya-based International Center for Research in Agroforestry, he developed a way of returning nutrients to exhausted soils without relying on costly chemical fertilizers. As many as 150 thousand small-scale farmers in Africa have been involved in applying the techniques developed by Pedro Sanchez on their farms, increasing their yields, in some cases, by as much as 200 to 400 percent.
Recognition of Mr. Sanchez?s work ranges from an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvaine in Brussels, to being made a tribal elder by the Luo tribe in western Kenya. Recently, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, appointed Mr. Sanchez to chair a special task force on world hunger. Pedro Sanchez credits his adopted country with making it possible for an immigrant from Cuba to pursue his youthful dream of helping alleviate world hunger.
As the recipient of this year?s World Food prize, Pedro Sanchez will be honored at a special global hunger symposium to be held in Iowa on October 24.