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"Making Markets Work Is Key To Beating Hunger," Says Economist
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as the director of the Millennium Villages project. Copyright: WFP/Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri.
Making markets work for the poor is the key to reaching the Millennium Development Goal on hunger, says economist Jeffrey Sachs, citing an innovative WFP pilot project -- Purchase for Progress -- which is making this happen for thousands of small farmers around the world. Watch video
NEW YORK – Building robust markets is the key to ending hunger in food insecure countries, economist and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs said Thursday at a roundtable discussion hosted by WFP on the sidelines of the Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York.
"The name of the game, in my view, is making the markets work," said Sachs. "That's what Purchase for Progress is doing," he added, referring to the WFP pilot programme, often called P4P, which uses the organization's hefty purchasing power to connect small farmers to markets.
Purchase for Progress
Through P4P, WFP buys food from small farmers to feed hungry people in the same country
- Find out how P4P helped an HIV positive woman from Kenya get back on her feet
- Find out more about how the programme works.
Joining WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran in a group discussion on the programme, Sachs explained that P4P was helping rural communities break into the free market by giving them the training and impetus to grow high-quality surpluses.
Building markets
“We’re about helping communities get inputs, be able to work their land better, build market experience and institutions, banks, collateral—after five or ten years of that process, you will have a self-sustaining market,” he said.
Sheeran confirmed that in the two years since its launch, P4P had already shown inspiring results in countries like Ethiopia and Uganda where farmers often lack the means and incentive to grow any more than they need to survive.
Read statement by WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran
Sachs also underlined the potential of a new approach towards combating hunger that empowers small farmers to become market players, while focusing on overall nutrition.
Leading solutions
“I am in favour of WFP being the centre-piece of solving the global hunger crisis in an integrated way,” he concluded. “We need a revolution in the joint science of agronomy and nutrition in order to favour healthy diets with locally produced food. I see WFP as the leader in the practical application of that.”
The discussion was attended by a number of aid experts and government officials, including the Honduran Agriculture Minister, Jacobo Regalado Weizembut, who said that P4P projects in his country were helping 6,000 small farmers climb out of poverty. “This initiative has transformed parts of rural Honduras where seven in ten people live under the poverty line,” he said.
