BERTINI / GLICKMAN: Making farms flourish

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By Catherine Bertini and Dan Glickman

COMMENTARY:

Americans are generous in a crisis, both here and abroad. No nation is swifter to respond, no people are more giving than Americans when a tragedy strikes. Today, a silent tragedy is sweeping the global south. More than 1 billion people are hungry because of a shortage of food. Most of those people are small farmers and their families living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

This crisis, and it is a crisis, must be met, for it has profound social, economic and security implications for the United States and the rest of the world.

The good news is the crisis can be abated. What is needed is leadership. And at a time when the world is expecting the United States to re-engage with the international community, a renewed commitment to alleviating hunger and poverty gives America the opportunity to reintroduce itself to the world as a force for positive change.

President Obama has indicated his support for such an effort, for he pledged - at the recent meeting of the Group of 20 richest countries - to increase U.S. support toward agricultural development to $1 billion by 2010. It will take strong and sustained presidential and congressional leadership to turn the new president's words into actions and to create a long-term strategy for America to take the lead in reducing global hunger and poverty.

Currently, the architecture of U.S. foreign assistance is deeply flawed. Despite the link between global poverty and farming, the United States spends 20 times more on food aid to the regions in crisis than on helping farmers there grow their own food.

Aid is critical, but, incredibly, our funding to build agriculture in developing countries has plummeted 85 percent since the 1980s. The U.S. government agencies that once made the "green revolution" possible no longer have the mandate or resources to help developing nations raise farm output and incomes.

What went wrong? In part, we were lulled into a false sense of security by progress after the green revolution. Although that revolution significantly reduced poverty in East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia, it did not reach sub-Saharan Africa or the poorest parts of South Asia.

We also assumed commercial agriculture could boost food output in Kenya, Bangladesh or India, yielding higher incomes and lower food prices. But it was small farmers living largely outside the market economy, with little access to the resources to enable them to produce a marketable surplus, who were hungry and poor. These circumstances leave more than 700 million people struggling to survive.

The United States is uniquely suited to support international efforts for agricultural development: It has the strongest agricultural research, education and extension system in the world.