By Stephanie Schupska
University of
Georgia
Instead of pouring emergency relief money into Africa, Pedro A. Sanchez says that
America needs to be teaching Africans how to be self-sustainable.
Sanchez will share his ideas at this year’s D.W. Brooks Lecture at the University of
Georgia as he speaks on “The African Green Revolution and the Millennium Villages
Project.” The annual lecture and awards ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday,
Oct. 3 in Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education.
“Africa is hungry and Americans would like to help,” he said. “But we’ve been
helping in the wrong way – by providing emergency food aid rather than enabling
African farmers to produce more food.”
Sanchez is the director of Tropical Agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia
University in New York. He is also a research scholar for the International Research
Institute for Climate Prediction and co-chair of the Millennium Project’s hunger task
force.
As a soil scientist at Columbia, he advises farmers in the west Kenyan village of
Sauri, according to a New York Times article, on how to revive their badly damaged
fields and how to plant trees as a way of fertilizing the soil for free, thus
dramatically increasing their crop yields.
The D.W. Brooks Lecture “audience should be thinking how individually and as UGA
they could get involved,” Sanchez said.
His talk will precede the presentation of this year’s D.W. Brooks Faculty Awards for
Excellence winners. The awards are given annually to UGA College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences faculty who excel in teaching, research, extension,
public service and global programs.
The awards were established in 1981 to recognize excellence in the CAES teaching
program. In 1983, they expanded to include research, extension and county
extension programs. An award for global programs was added in 1988 and is given
in alternate years.
The lecture and awards are named for the late D.W. Brooks, founder and chairman
emeritus of Gold Kist, Inc. Brooks was an advisor to seven U.S. presidents on
agriculture and trade issues. He also started Cotton States Mutual Insurance
Companies in 1941 to provide farmers with insurance. The CAES sponsors the
annual lecture series in his memory.
