Putting agriculture back on the map

Jan 29th, 2010 5:50 PM UTC
By Emily Alpert

Please welcome Emily Alpert to the ONE Blog! Emily is ONE’s new Senior Policy Manager for Agriculture, and will no doubt have many more great contributions in the coming days and weeks. -Chris

If you haven’t yet read the second annual letter from Bill Gates, please do. I just read it and I was so glad to see how important investing in agriculture is to the Gates Foundation. Not only are more than 1 billion people suffering from hunger as I write, but the large majority – about 75 percent – of poor people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and their own food security. So when they can’t harvest their crops, can’t get them to market or can’t get a decent price for what they produce, their well-being is severely jeopardized. To top things off, development aid for agriculture has been neglected for the last few decades. That’s why the Gate’s Foundation’s work on agriculture is so important. Along with others, they are putting agriculture back on the map of the development agenda.

How much you invest in agriculture is also as important in how you invest in agriculture. So when Bill Gates talks about funding projects based on the “specific growing conditions in developing countries” and “the crops that are grown by poor farmers,” I know the Gates Foundation approach is going in the right direction. First of all, most of the research and development in agriculture over the years has been devoted mostly to rich country crops and environments. And sometimes there are payoffs from that work for poor countries too, but not always, and definitely not enough. So getting these investments right by listening and learning to poor farmers in developing countries and investing in ways that meet their needs is critical for helping farmers grow their way out of poverty.

Sustainable agriculture production is also an issue that has been on my mind lately. It’s no secret that some of key ingredients for growing food – healthy soils and fresh water – are in high demand and short supply. So with scarce resources, continuously threatened by climate change, it’s even more important that we come up with new and innovative ways to farm sustainably. This is yet another way in which the Gates Foundation is making headway by investing in better seeds, training for farmers on how to manage their land and access to inputs, markets and information.

As ONE members you can add to this momentum by supporting ONE’s efforts to encourage the U.S. Government to invest more and in better ways to developing country agriculture, and to push donor governments to fulfill the commitments to agriculture that they made at the G8 meetings in L’Aquila last year.
You can check out our agriculture issue page here to learn more.

TAGS: Agriculture, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Policy News