Growing up in Cuba, Pedro A. Sanchez spent a lot of time on his family’s farm outside of Havana. He loved playing with dirt — and he became fascinated with Cuba’s red tropical soil. His family owned a fertilizer business, and he watched his father work with farmers to improve the quality of their land.
Sanchez moved to the United States to attend Cornell University, going on to become a world-renowned soil scientist. He has dedicated his career to lifting people out of hunger and out of poverty.
Now a research professor of tropical soils at the University of Florida, he is a core faculty member of its Food Systems Institute. At Columbia University’s Earth Institute, he served as director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center, as a senior research scholar, and as director of the Millennium Villages project. He was also cochair of the United Nations Millennium Project Hunger Task Force.
Sanchez’s pioneering work opened up millions of hectares of land in South America to farming production, while his soil rejuvenation and agroforestry work in Africa tackled hunger and improved sustainability. He established alternatives to destructive “slash-and-burn” farming practices and has worked to mitigate the effects of global warming.
His honors include the World Food Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“When a farmer comes to me and says, ‘Because of what you have taught us, my family is no longer hungry and I have my dignity restored’ — wow,” he said. “That’s more important than all the honors I’ve gotten.”
