Development Works Number 5, December 2012 | Page 2

was at 14.9 percent of the world population in 2010-2012,
down from 23.2 percent in 1990-1992.

enough food for everyone—but that truth doesn’t make
dinner appear on everyone’s plate. Local farmers, most with
less than five acres of land and little or no animal or mechanical power, bear most of the responsibility for making
food available to their communities and nations.
Producing the grains, protein sources, and vegetables
people need clearly requires a very practical understanding of local agricultural conditions. Development efforts
should focus on increasing small farmers’ access to information and tools and on building their resilience, particularly given the uncertainties inherent in agriculture. For at
least the next several decades, most developing countries
will need productive small farmers to feed their increasing,
and increasingly urban, populations. Ensuring that even
the most remote farm communities and the poorest farmers
have the supplies and techniques they need will be essential
to making further progress on global hunger.
There’s a second reason farmers must be fully engaged in
efforts to end global hunger: ironically, most of the world’s
hungry people, more than three-fourths, are smallholder
farmers, landless farm laborers, and their families.
Fortunately, boosting agricultural productivity has proven to be one of the best ways of reducing global poverty.
Feed the Future, the U.S. global hunger initiative, reports
that growth in the agriculture sector is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors. In fact,
improvements in agriculture deserve the credit for much
of the recent significant progress against hunger—which

Needs That Are Literally Down to Earth

Laura Elizabeth Pohl/Bread for the World

In developing countries, most obstacles to producing
enough nutritious food are rooted in poverty. Anti-hunger
leader Nana Ayim Poakwah of Ghana explains that about
40 percent of what is grown goes to waste because farmers
cannot get crops to market before they spoil. Farm families
eat some of the food they grow, sell some locally—and then
have no option but to abandon the rest in the field.
Poakwah and others at Ghana’s Food Aid Network developed ways of providing farmers with simple storage facilities
and arranging transportation to bring their crops to market.
In return, farmers donate 10 percent of their harvests. “It
works for both sides,” Poakwah says. “Without the program,
farmers would lose much more of their harvest. And we get
the food to vulnerable people, especially children.”
Philanthropist Bill Gates, discussing the importance of
helping small farmers become more productive, identifies
another need: “The question is, how do we continue to do
the research needed to develop these new tools? Poor countries are investing more in their own agricultural sectors,
but they don’t have the resources to lead on research and
development… and right now the entire research budget of
the group responsible for agricultural science for the poorest people is just $300 million per year.”
Feed the Future has made reducing hunger and poverty
an explicit goal. “We are focused on measuring results—as
opposed to inputs—so we better understand what works,