Food/Agriculture

Fertile Ground: How Governments and Donors can Halve Hunger by Supporting Small Farmers

Report for ActionAid, April 2010

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. It shows that agriculture budgets fail to focus on the people who do most of the farming – smallholder women farmers, and that the services that would help poor farmers and women the most – such as rural credit and agricultural research focused on smallholders – are the most under-resourced. 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.

Halving hunger by investment in small farmers

Briefing for ActionAid, March 2010

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. As a result, the world is now moving further away from meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve hunger by 2015. This briefing focuses on how governments and donors are not spending enough on services that really matter to poor farmers – such as low-cost credit and public agricultural extension services – and how they must reinvest in smallholder farmers.

Five out of ten?: Assessing progress towards the African Union’s 10% budget target for agriculture

Report for ActionAid (June 2009)

This report assesses government progress towards achieving the targets set by the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). It finds that the overwhelming majority of African governments are failing to meet their commitments to spend 10 per cent of national budgets on agriculture and to double spending on research and development. Donors too are failing to meet their aid commitments to African agriculture.

The global food crisis and fairtrade: Small farmers, big solutions?

Report for the Fairtrade Foundation (February 2009)

This report considers the challenges faced by the world’s 450 million smallholder farmers as a result
of the food price crisis. It analyses the effects of the crisis on fairtrade producers around the world,
including from field research in Uganda, asking whether fairtrade procuers are in a better position to
cope with price volatility. View Mark Curtis’ talk on the report’s findings.

The crisis in Agricultural Aid: How aid has contributed to hunger

Paper for ActionAid (September 2008)

This paper is an analysis of overseas aid to agriculture, showing how aid levels have dramatically
declined over the past two decades, how the focus of aid spending is not geared to the needs of poor
farmers and how aid has been used to push a neo-liberal economic model of agriculture that has
increased poverty and hunger.

Deadly combination: The role of Southern governments and
the World Bank in the rise of hunger

Report for Norwegian Church Aid and other European NGOs (October 2007)

This detailed report is an analysis of the impact on hunger-prone people of the economic reforms
promoted by the World Bank and IMF over the past 15 years. It contains a synthesis report plus
case studies on Ethiopia, Malawi and Zambia. It argues that both World Bank liberalisation policies
and government intervention policies are, in their messy, unstrategic combination, serving to
increase hunger.