UN summit on MDGs prioritises agriculture

This culminated in an announcement by the World Bank that it “will increase its support to agriculture to between $6 to $8 billion a year over the next three years.” The organisation’s Agriculture Action Plan, up from $4.1 billion annually before 2008, aims to boost incomes, employment and food security in many low-income areas.

This is an important development for a sector that has been seriously unfunded in recent years. Whilst a large number of initiatives have been launched or strengthened that address food security and rural development, funding for these programmes is flowing slowly. Of the $22 billion that was pledged in 2009 for the newly launched Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP), the promises have yielded only $6 million in new money, according to ActionAid’s estimates.

Jacques Diouf of FAO stated the problem clearly; “The current dramatic hunger situation is the result of neglect of agriculture in development policies over the past three decades. It is time to tackle the root causes of food insecurity by adopting lasting political, economic, financial, and technical solutions.”

Investing in smallholder agriculture underpins succeeding with all the MDGs. As the producers of food, farmers’ role in hunger eradication is obvious, but farmers also represent one-third of the world’s population and one-half of its poor, while the majority of smallholder farmers are women.

“When farming families manage to increase production, they can sell their surplus and raise extra income to pay for school fees, hospital visits, medicines and more nutritious food,” said Jim Prokopanko, CEO of Mosaic Company and representative of the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) at the summit.

In 2010, Mosaic, one of several agricultural companies that partners with the Milllennium Villages project, has donated $2.1 million in fertilizer and associated logistic costs. Improving farmers’ access to key inputs was a message reiterated by Jim Borel, executive vice-president of DuPont, who said, “We need an approach that is farmer-centred, ensuring they have access to the things they need to produce a crop – such as the best seed technologies, land, water, knowledge, inputs and credit.”

An essential step is to include farmers directly in decisions. Speaking at the UN Roundtable on Hunger and Poverty, David King, secretary general of the International Federation of Agriculture Producers said, “Farmer organisations have a vital contribution to make to the development of agriculture and rural communities. Unless small-scale farmers are organised, they will remain politically powerless and economically disadvantaged.”

During the MDG summit, the UN General Assembly agreed on a series of policies and actions in ‘Keeping the Promise: United to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals”. The statement places a strong emphasis on agricultural development, to promote ‘at all levels a strong enabling environment for enhancing agriculture production, productivity and sustainability in developing countries.”

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