Fertile Ground: How Governments and Donors can Halve Hunger by Supporting Small Farmers
Posted by markcurtis on June 4, 2010
New report for ActionAid
This report is an analysis of government agriculture budgets and policy based on extensive research and interviews with several hundred farmers, the majority of them women, in Uganda, Kenya and Malawi, an extensive global literature review and interviews with government, donors, academic and civil society staff in the three countries.
Five shortfalls are identified that must be addressed urgently:
• Neither governments nor donors are spending enough on agriculture. Governments in Africa are spending only around 6.6 per cent of their national budgets on agriculture, or little more than US$15 per year for every rural inhabitant. Donor support to African farming has fallen from 15 per cent of total aid budgets in the 1990s to only 4 per cent in 2006. By contrast, during the Green Revolution era, Asian governments allocated as much as 15 per cent of their budgets to agriculture. With 75 per cent of the world’s poor people living in rural areas, and agriculture making up a third of national income in poor countries, the current level of investment is simply too low.
• Agriculture budgets fail to focus on the people who do most of the farming – smallholder women farmers. Although women constitute the majority of farmers in most countries and produce most of the locally consumed food in developing countries, nearly all agricultural policies assumes farmers are men.
• The things that would help poor farmers and women the most – such as rural credit and agricultural research focused on smallholders – are the most under-resourced. Low-cost, ecologically sustainable and climate-resilient methods of increasing productivity are being neglected in favour of costly, chemical-intensive approaches that often benefit richer farmers most, and can do environmental damage.
• Donors are using resources poorly by failing to uphold the aid effectiveness commitments of the Paris Declaration of 2005. Donor addiction to multiple projects reinforces and perpetuates capacity gaps in agriculture ministries.
• Ministries of Agriculture are ill equipped to spend existing resources effectively. Few are fit for purpose after years of neglect and under-resourcing, and many are in dire need of reform.
To read the full report, click here
