World Food Prize laureate will speak about Millennium Project goal Nov. 11

By Linda McCandless

A Cornell alumnus credited with turning 75 million acres of the poorest soil in Brazil into productive farmland will present the final lecture of the World Food Prize Seminar Series on Nov. 11.

Sanchez

Pedro Sanchez, B.S. '62, M.S. '64, Ph.D. '68, the World Food Prize laureate for 2002, will deliver "Recommendations of the U.N. Millennium Project Hunger Task Force to Achieve the Millennium Development Goal" at 3:30 p.m. in G10 Biotechnology Building. An informal reception will follow.

Sanchez, who chairs the U.N. task force, is director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. He is the former director-general of the International Centre for Research on Agroforestry in Kenya and a professor emeritus of soil science at North Carolina State University. He was elected to the Cornell University Council in 2003.

As the leader of the North Carolina State University Rice Research Program in the 1970s, Sanchez guided Peru to dramatic gains in food security. Within three years, that nation achieved not only self-sufficiency in rice production but one of the highest rice yields in the world. In the past three decades, his pioneering methods for reviving tropical agriculture while saving threatened rainforests have restored fertility to the poorest and most depleted soils in Africa and Latin America, transforming the lives of hundreds of thousands of small farmers.

Cornell's World Food Prize Seminar Series was organized by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences International Program in conjunction with the college's centennial celebration. The three seminars given this fall have featured five World Food Prize laureates, including Nevin Scrimshaw, professor of nutrition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Catherine Bertini, United Nations undersecretary general for management; Cornell Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen; and Monty Jones, executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa. For more information, contact June Losurdo, centennial director, 255-7771 or jml235@cornell.edu.