"Put Food First," Help Rural Farmers

“Put Food First” is a big theme at the World Bank and IMF’s annual meetings in Washington this week, where global financial leaders are looking at how best to respond to spiraling food prices. Everywhere you go in the bank, there are posters, giant screens and other material – including a ticking “hunger clock” – to remind you of a gruesome statistic. One in seven people are hungry in the world – in sheer numbers, that is one billion people.

That number is startling and can only get worse as food prices rise to unprecedented levels.  A live two-hour webcast at the Bank on Friday, moderated by BBC World News America anchor Matt Frei, looked not only at why so many people are hungry but also at what solutions might work to ease this crisis.

The overwhelming message is that there needs to be a bigger focus on rural farmers, particularly women who often form the backbone of agriculture in many of the poorest nations. Other obvious fixes are better irrigation, greater access to markets, improved farming methods, seeds and roads; more readily available and cheaper mobile technology would also help.

For World Food Programme head Josette Sheeran, the biggest change in a nation often comes when political leaders put their hand up and say: “People will not starve under my watch." That happened, she said, in Rwanda, Malawi and Ghana, where there has been success in fighting hunger. So political leadership really counts when it comes to tackling hunger.

Several InterAction members were on Friday’s high-powered panel, including Bread for the World’s David Beckmann, who has just finished a week-long water fast, partly to put pressure on U.S. lawmakers not to cut key accounts in the U.S. budget that support vulnerable and hungry people.

In Beckmann’s view, there needs to be a greater commitment by the world to helping rural farmers, who are neglected simply because they are not powerful. Tom Arnold, CEO of InterAction member Concern Worldwide (who wrote an excellent blog this week on AidBuzz about the food crisis), said the focus must also be on more country-owned food strategies.

This was highlighted by agricultural expert  Lindiwe Sibanda, who cited a wells project that crashed because when the NGO left, the local population had not been trained to do repairs. A solution to that would have been to produce the well pumps locally. That would have not only provided employment, but also the local expertise to fix them when something went wrong. Not rocket science, said several of the speakers of the solutions.

Rwanda’s agriculture minister, Agnes Matilda Kalibata, pointed to simple terracing methods being used more frequently in her country, which is often called the land of a thousand hills because of its mountainous terrain

Out in the “Twittershere” and via Facebook,  there were many questions and suggestions for panelists. A question InterAction asked – which was read out at the debate – was whether G8 leaders will follow through on $22 billion in pledges made in 2009 at L’Aquila to help make people more secure when it comes to food. When world leaders meet in France on May 26-27 for the annual G8 summit, we will be looking out for that. We’ll be there to see. Watch this space….

** Don't forget to check out InterAction's food security mapping initiative to see what our members are doing in this area. http://foodsecurity.ngoaidmap.org/