Sanchez highlights African Green Revolution during inaugural Borlaug lecture
Pedro Sanchez has devoted his career to developing science-based solutions to help communities achieve food security and reduce poverty while protecting the environment.
Photo by Becky Kirkland
The term hunger often evokes images of people suffering from drought, disaster and war. But, said World Food Prize winner Dr. Pedro Sanchez, the vast majority of hungry people suffer from more chronic issues best addressed not by food aid but rather by programs designed to help farmers produce more food.
Sanchez had returned to Raleigh in October to take part in N.C. State's observance of World Food Day. He was a soil science faculty member at N.C. State for 23 years, until 1991, when he became director general of the World Agroforestry Center headquartered in Kenya. Today, he is director of tropical agriculture and senior research scholar at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
Sanchez's talk was the first Borlaug Distinguished Lecture on Global Service to Society and the Environment. Sponsored by the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Natural Resources, the annual lecture is named for the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug, considered the father of the so-called Green Revolution.
Sanchez gave his lecture what he called "an optimistic title": The African Green Revolution Is Happening. While the Borlaug-led revolution transformed agriculture in much of the world in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, it largely bypassed sub-Saharan African. There, "unhealthy soils and untamed water," combined with the need for better crop and livestock varieties and an empowered extension system, created the world's "remaining big, continental-scale hunger, poverty and disease problem," he said.
Throughout his career, Sanchez has worked to develop science-based solutions that help communities achieve food security and reduce poverty while protecting and enhancing the environment.
He recently co-chaired the United Nation's Hunger Task Force, a team of experts assembled to outline what could be done to help achieve the goal of cutting hunger in half by 2015. That goal is part of the ambitious Millennium Project begun in 2002 to stem poverty, disease and environmental degradation in developing nations.
In his lecture, Sanchez noted, "We've never been so rich and prosperous in the world, but roughly one out of six of us - a little bit less - does not know where the next meal is coming from. And one billion out of six billion live on a miserable income of less than one U.S. dollar per day.
"One of the things we learned in the Hunger Task Force . is that of all these hungry people, the vast majority of them - 92 percent - suffer from chronic malnutrition. They are the chronically hungry people. These are the people who do not . starve, but . they die in droves, especially children, of malnutrition and related diseases."
Through the Earth Institute and its Millennium Villages Project, Sanchez is working to provide early successes on how to alleviate such hunger and achieving other Millennium goals for poverty, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination.
He outlined the quick successes achieved in Sauri, Kenya, where residents have doubled their food output, strengthened a school lunch program and expanded a health clinic.
Such success demonstrates that the "development paradigm has to change" so that more funding from donor agencies reaches farmers and others "on the ground," Sanchez said. And it's better to invest in soil, water, seeds and other improvements at the front end of the food chain rather than focusing on the chain's end of cooking and eating.
He pointed to a U.N. Food and Agriculture study that showed that a total of $40 per family would support a small-scale farm family in Malawi with investments in fertilizers, seeds, irrigation systems and the like, versus $400 to provide the family with food aid.
"Now what kind of business are we in when we are paying the $400 and not the $40?" he said. "We've got to get serious about this stuff. We've got to get practical."
Addressing chronic malnutrition is, above all, a "moral imperative," Sanchez said. But it also has important implications for improving international security and the world economy.
Sanchez closed by referring to a sign he'd seen in a Florida bait shop. It's a twist on an old Confucian proverb:
"'Give people a fish, and they will eat for a day:' That's dependency; that's food aid. Unfortunately that's what we are supporting the most," Sanchez said. "'Show them how to fish, and they will eat for a lifetime': That's empowerment; that's hunger elimination. 'And they will buy fishing equipment:' . That means trade. That means poverty elimination.
"And without a doubt," he concluded, "it can be done."
-Dee Shore
Sanchez had returned to Raleigh in October to take part in N.C. State's observance of World Food Day. He was a soil science faculty member at N.C. State for 23 years, until 1991, when he became director general of the World Agroforestry Center headquartered in Kenya. Today, he is director of tropical agriculture and senior research scholar at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
Sanchez's talk was the first Borlaug Distinguished Lecture on Global Service to Society and the Environment. Sponsored by the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Natural Resources, the annual lecture is named for the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug, considered the father of the so-called Green Revolution.
Sanchez gave his lecture what he called "an optimistic title": The African Green Revolution Is Happening. While the Borlaug-led revolution transformed agriculture in much of the world in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, it largely bypassed sub-Saharan African. There, "unhealthy soils and untamed water," combined with the need for better crop and livestock varieties and an empowered extension system, created the world's "remaining big, continental-scale hunger, poverty and disease problem," he said.
Throughout his career, Sanchez has worked to develop science-based solutions that help communities achieve food security and reduce poverty while protecting and enhancing the environment.
He recently co-chaired the United Nation's Hunger Task Force, a team of experts assembled to outline what could be done to help achieve the goal of cutting hunger in half by 2015. That goal is part of the ambitious Millennium Project begun in 2002 to stem poverty, disease and environmental degradation in developing nations.
In his lecture, Sanchez noted, "We've never been so rich and prosperous in the world, but roughly one out of six of us - a little bit less - does not know where the next meal is coming from. And one billion out of six billion live on a miserable income of less than one U.S. dollar per day.
"One of the things we learned in the Hunger Task Force . is that of all these hungry people, the vast majority of them - 92 percent - suffer from chronic malnutrition. They are the chronically hungry people. These are the people who do not . starve, but . they die in droves, especially children, of malnutrition and related diseases."
Through the Earth Institute and its Millennium Villages Project, Sanchez is working to provide early successes on how to alleviate such hunger and achieving other Millennium goals for poverty, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination.
He outlined the quick successes achieved in Sauri, Kenya, where residents have doubled their food output, strengthened a school lunch program and expanded a health clinic.
Such success demonstrates that the "development paradigm has to change" so that more funding from donor agencies reaches farmers and others "on the ground," Sanchez said. And it's better to invest in soil, water, seeds and other improvements at the front end of the food chain rather than focusing on the chain's end of cooking and eating.
He pointed to a U.N. Food and Agriculture study that showed that a total of $40 per family would support a small-scale farm family in Malawi with investments in fertilizers, seeds, irrigation systems and the like, versus $400 to provide the family with food aid.
"Now what kind of business are we in when we are paying the $400 and not the $40?" he said. "We've got to get serious about this stuff. We've got to get practical."
Addressing chronic malnutrition is, above all, a "moral imperative," Sanchez said. But it also has important implications for improving international security and the world economy.
Sanchez closed by referring to a sign he'd seen in a Florida bait shop. It's a twist on an old Confucian proverb:
"'Give people a fish, and they will eat for a day:' That's dependency; that's food aid. Unfortunately that's what we are supporting the most," Sanchez said. "'Show them how to fish, and they will eat for a lifetime': That's empowerment; that's hunger elimination. 'And they will buy fishing equipment:' . That means trade. That means poverty elimination.
"And without a doubt," he concluded, "it can be done."
-Dee Shore