Influential Bill Gates shares his ideas on what he considers a convergent issue on productivity and sustainability as complementary approaches to helping small farmers towards food security. What are your thoughts and reactions on this?
Helping poor farmers improve productivity is a critical step in reducing global hunger. But there is an ideological divide over how best to help them. The truth is that both sides have something important to offer.
While the World Summit on Food Security in Rome in November did not achieve all it should, it shined a welcome spotlight on small farmers who make up the vast majority of hungry and poor people in the world. Coming on the heels of a commitment by the G20 to invest $22 billion in developing-country agriculture, the summit provided reason to be optimistic that after decades of neglect, we’ll start investing in the single best strategy to reduce global hunger and poverty.
At the same time, I am worried that as momentum builds behind agricultural development as a long-term alternative to food aid, a growing ideological divide may cause the world to squander a real opportunity to fight hunger and poverty.
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