Halving hunger through investment in small farmers
Posted by markcurtis on March 25, 2010
MDG Briefing Paper for ActionAid, March 2010
The read the full briefing, click here
The number of hungry people in the world is rapidly increasing. For the first time in human history, more than one billion people in the world – one-sixth of humanity – are now hungry . Nearly one in three of the world’s children are growing up chronically malnourished , with hunger playing a contributing factor in up to half of all child deaths . As a result, the world is now moving further away from meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve hunger by 2015. If current trends continue, more than 1.5 billion will be undernourished by 2015. This startling increase in hunger is also threatening to erode progress on other MDGs. Urgent action is needed to tackle this unprecedented growth in hunger and to get MDG1 back on track. ActionAid believes that small scale farming must be absolutely central to any ‘hunger rescue’ strategy.
Over half the hungry people in the world are small farmers, living on plots of two hectares or less, trying to eke out an existence for themselves and their families. One third of all Africa’s malnourished children live on small farms . Yet small farmers have been systematically ignored for decades by governments and donors alike. Most striking of all is the colossal failure to support women, who make up the majority of farmers in most developing countries. Any global strategy for halving poverty and hunger must address the billions of small scale farmers across the developing world.
The few countries which have effectively invested and supported smallholder agriculture over the past two decades have shown striking results in tackling hunger and poverty. Evidence abounds that economic growth led by agriculture is better at reducing poverty. As a result of the food crisis of 2008, many world leaders have now acknowledged that food security cannot be left to the vagaries of the market and that strong and effective agricultural policies are necessary to tackle inequality and support poor farmers. However, this rhetoric is yet to translate into the level of ambition needed to turn the tide on years of endemic neglect or into a coherent plan to target smallholders.
Aid to agriculture, after collapsing between 1980-2005, is now rising but insufficiently to make progress on the MDG target to halve hunger. At US$8.4billion in 2008, donors spend about the same on aid to agriculture as on administering their own aid programmes. In response the food crisis, donors committed themselves to spending $22.2 billion on agricultural aid over 2009-2011 in the 2009 G8 L’Aquila Initiative. But ActionAid’s calculation is that only around $3.7 billion of this is actually new money. Most developing countries are also spending insufficiently, after massively cutting their spending on agriculture between 1980 and 2000. Only eight African countries have met their commitment, agreed in 2003, to spend 10 per cent of their national budgets on agriculture.
So, what can be done? Firstly, aid and national budgets for agriculture must increase sharply to address hunger. But increases alone are not enough. The way this investment is implemented and the technologies it adopts, will determine whether or not this new effort will truly benefit the poor. Much donor aid and government spending to agriculture is still passing smallholders by. Currently, governments and donors are not spending enough on services that really matter to poor farmers – areas such as public credit, or public extension services – which became virtually non-existent during the neo-liberal reforms imposed during structural adjustment.
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