Many smallholder farmers are women struggling to feed their families.
(Copyright: WFP/Laura Melo)
UN agencies on the front line of food insecurity are bringing concerns on the impact of the economic crisis on smallholder farmers in developing countries to a meeting of G8 Agriculture Ministers in Italy on 18-20 April.
The G8 Ministers have invited the chiefs of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to brief them on how the UN is responding to the crisis.
“As the financial crisis unleashes more hunger by compounding the impact of the food crisis on the world’s most vulnerable, G-8 leaders must put food security at the top of their agenda,” said WFP's Executive Director, Josette Sheeran. “This includes ensuring access to food for all, as well as focusing on increased agricultural production.”
30 million more beneficiaries
Last year, WFP responded to the food crisis with an unprecedented emergency scale-up, adding 30 million people to its beneficiary lists. In 2009, WFP estimates it needs to feed more than 100 million people.
As well as providing food to vulnerable populations, WFP has undertaken a number of innovative projects to deal with hunger: cash and voucher distributions, local procurement to support small-scale farmers, and school feeding programmes to encourage parents to send their children to school and keep them there.
“In order to feed the nearly one billion hungry people and provide for the extra three billion people coming into the world by the year 2050, the world needs political leadership and well invested resources,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “World leaders looking for ways to save the global economy from disaster and to create jobs and income for millions of people in rural areas would be well advised to invest heavily in agriculture.
Supporting food production
FAO is currently engaged in over 90 countries, in most cases supporting food production with the supply of improved seeds, fertilizers, other agricultural inputs and technical assistance of around $350 million in 2008. Nearly seven million smallholder farmers and their 35 million dependents - the majority women and children - benefited directly from this support.
After 20 years of declining investment in agriculture, recent global summits show that the international community realizes that this sector is central to promoting wider economic growth in developing countries, said Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD’s new President.
“But declarations don’t feed poor people, actions do. At the Treviso meeting we want to ensure that the voices of poor smallholder farmers from around the world are heard and that we come away with a commitment for action,” he said.
Three quarters of the world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people live in rural areas. IFAD works with and for some 500 million smallholder farmers, men and women, enabling them to feed themselves, to access markets, to cope with climate change and to catalyse economic growth in poor rural areas.
