Laura Elizabeth Pohl/Bread for the World
Ensuring that small-scale producers,
such as this Mexican farmer, are able to
grow enough food to meet their families’
needs must be a key part of the effort to
end hunger and malnutrition.
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 was at 14.9 percent of the world population in 2010-2012,
down from 23.2 percent in 1990-1992.
Needs That Are Literally Down to Earth
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.”
90
22 Essay 4
n
percent:
the share of rice cultivation
work done by women in
India, Nepal, and Thailand.
Bread for the World Institute
10 percent:
share of
female farmers who own land
in India, Nepal, and Thailand.