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Many poor, food-importing countries around the world
have become desperate in recent months, as global
prices of rice, wheat, and maize have doubled.
Hundreds of millions of poor people, who already
spend a large share of their daily budget on food,
are being pushed to the edge. Food riots are
mounting.
But many poor countries can grow more food
themselves, because their farmers are producing far
below what is technologically possible. In some
cases, with appropriate government action, they
could double or even triple food production in just
a few years.
The idea is basic and well known. Traditional
farming uses few inputs and gets poor yields. Poor
peasants use their own seeds from the preceding
season, lack fertilizer, depend on rain rather than
irrigation, and have little if any mechanization
beyond a traditional hoe. Their farms are small,
perhaps one hectare or less.
Under traditional agricultural conditions, the
yields of grain - rice, wheat, maize, sorghum, or
millet - are usually around one ton per hectare, for
one planting season per year. For a farm family of
five or six living on one hectare, this means
extreme poverty, and for their country, it means
reliance on expensive food imports, including food
aid.
The solution is to increase grain yields to at least
two tons - and in some places to three or more tons
- per hectare. If water can be managed through
irrigation, this could be combined with
multi-cropping (multiple harvests per year) to
produce a crop during the dry season. Higher and
more frequent yields mean less poverty in farm
families, and lower food prices for cities.
The key to increasing yields is to ensure that even
the poorest farmers have access to improved seed
varieties (usually "hybrid" seeds created by
scientific selection of seed varieties), chemical
fertilizers, organic matter to replenish soil
nutrients, and, where possible, small-scale
irrigation methods, such as a pump to lift water
from a nearby well.
There is nothing magic about this combination of
high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale
irrigation. It is the key to the worldwide increase
in food production since the 1960s.
The problem is that these improved inputs have
bypassed the poorest farmers and the poorest
countries. When peasants lack their own saving
accounts and collateral, they are unable to borrow
from banks to buy seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation.
As a result, they grow food the traditional way,
often earning little or nothing from their harvest,
because it is not even enough to keep their families
alive.
History has shown that government action is required
to help the poorest farmers escape the low-yield
poverty trap. If farmers can be helped to obtain
simple technologies, income can rise, and they can
accumulate bank balances and collateral. With a bit
of temporary help, perhaps lasting around five
years, farmers can build up enough wealth to obtain
inputs on a market basis, either through direct
purchases from savings or through bank loans.
Around the world, government-run agricultural banks
in poor countries once not only financed inputs, but
also provided agricultural advice and spread new
seed technologies. Of course, there were abuses,
such as the allocation of public credits to richer
farmers rather than to needy ones, or the prolonged
subsidization of inputs even after farmers became
creditworthy. And in many cases, government
agricultural banks went bankrupt.
Still, the financing of inputs played a huge and
positive role in helping the poorest farmers to
escape poverty and dependency on food aid.
During the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced
dozens of poor food-importing countries to dismantle
these state systems. Poor farmers were told to fend
for themselves, to let "market forces" provide for
inputs. This was a profound mistake: there were no
such market forces.
Poor farmers lost access to fertilizers and improved
seed varieties. They could not obtain bank
financing. To its credit, the World Bank recognized
this mistake in a scathing internal evaluation of
its long-standing agricultural policies last year.
The time has come to re-establish public financing
systems that enable small farmers in the poorest
countries, notably those farming on two hectares or
less, to gain access to needed inputs of high-yield
seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale irrigation.
Malawi has done this for the past three seasons, and
has doubled its food production as a result. Other
low-income countries should follow suit.
Importantly, the World Bank, under its new
president, Robert Zoellick, has now stepped forward
to help finance this new approach. If the Bank
provides grants to poor countries to help small
peasant farmers gain access to improved inputs, then
it will be possible for those countries to increase
their food production in a short period of time.
Donor governments, including the oil-rich countries
of the Middle East, should help finance the World
Bank's new efforts. The world should set as a
practical goal of doubling grain yields in
low-income Africa and similar regions (such as
Haiti) during the next five years.
That is achievable if the World Bank, donor
governments, and poor countries direct their
attention to the urgent needs of the world's poorest
farmers.
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