Global Food for Thought

Commentary: Public-Private Partnerships: The value of recognizing each others value-add to curb hunger

By Sam Worthington

This blog is part of a series organized by The Chicago Council’s Global Agriculture Development Initiative and InterAction to highlight the importance of public-private partnerships in agricultural development. This commentary is cross-posted with InterAction’s blog.   

Newly-released figures on world hunger are heartening in their downward trajectory. The rate of undernourished people worldwide has declined over the last two decades. But one in eight people, or 12.5 percent of the world’s population, still suffer from undernutrition, and the rate of progress has slowed in recent years. These hunger figures aren’t just a shock to our global consciousness – they are a call to collective action.

How can the world, with 7 billion people and growing, get to a point where it can feed itself? The answer is a complicated one, of course, that food security experts and practitioners now understand pivots on the smallholder farmer, and women in particular. Supporting smallholder farmers and opening new markets is not possible in a high-impact, sustainable way if we work alone. It will require the joint efforts of governments, civil society and the private sector, through public-private partnerships that leverage the added value of all these groups.

It is widely agreed now that ensuring the world is able to feed itself is not about scaling up food production in bread baskets and exporting it to areas of need, as once thought. This costly model of trying to address hunger by providing access to food from afar is too expensive and sidesteps the rural poor living on the margins of roads and other infrastructure. It also proved unsustainable in the face of surging population growth and food price spikes.

We now know that small-scale farmers have a major role to play. When a smallholder farmer is able to nutritiously feed her family and keep a surplus left over to sell, she has spending money that leads to the creation of new local markets. New markets spur local economic growth that can dramatically improve livelihoods by increasing incomes and creating jobs.

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Photo of the Week

A key component of the One Acre Fund model is loan repayment. Farmers receive inputs on loan, and are expected to repay by the end of September, after harvest. The organization employs hundreds of field officers like this one to collect and record farmer repayments. One Acre Fund is an NGO in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi that helps 130,000 smallholder farmers grow their own way out of poverty by providing a "market bundle" that includes education, finance, seed and fertilizer, and market access. Credit: Stephanie Hanson

Photo of the Week

A key component of the One Acre Fund model is loan repayment. Farmers receive inputs on loan, and are expected to repay by the end of September, after harvest. The organization employs hundreds of field officers like this one to collect and record farmer repayments. One Acre Fund is an NGO in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi that helps 130,000 smallholder farmers grow their own way out of poverty by providing a "market bundle" that includes education, finance, seed and fertilizer, and market access. Credit: Stephanie Hanson

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Commentary - Be a Leader, Entrepreneur whose Livelihood Provides Food for Others

By Paul Schickler 
Paul E. Schickler is president of DuPont Pioneer. He was named vice president, director, Latin America Operations for Pioneer in 1999, with Africa added in 2002. In October 2003, responsibility for the remaining international businesses was added, and he was named vice president, International Operations. In November 2007, he was named Pioneer president. 

This commentary is part of a series organized by The Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative and the World Food Prize to examine the relationship between water, agriculture, and food security in the lead up to this year's Borlaug Dialogue. 

This week in Iowa, leaders from around the world will come together at the 2012 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium to debate solutions to ensure global food security.  Simultaneously, many Americans will watch as Presidential candidates debate the best path to U.S. economic security.  One way we can address both global economic and food security challenges is by presenting young people with entrepreneurial opportunities in agriculture – bringing next gen innovation to the farm and all along the value chain.

At last year’s Borlaug Dialogue, we were inspired by people like Rikin Gandhi of Digital Green, an MIT educated young man who works directly with local, smallholder farmers in India and Sub-Saharan Africa.  His tech business supports farmers and created dozens of jobs. This year, I was excited to hear from Ellen Gustafson of FEED Projects, who created a business that feeds children across the globe. Recently Nourishing the Planet produced a list of young persons like Ms. Gustafson who are renovating food production and distribution methods to ensure everyone has nutritious food to eat.  Also included on this list is Festus Annor-Frempong, a professor at Cape Coast University, who works to improve agricultural extension services throughout Ghana. These three young leaders took hugely different approaches to food and agricultural development, but their efforts are symbiotic.   

The breadth of opportunity for innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture is unmatched.  Beyond its potential as an engine to arouse economies and create jobs, a focus on agriculture will improve food security and alleviate strained food prices, which the United Nations recently announced as at six-month high with potential to climb.

Entrepreneurs, Agriculture is Your Opportunity

Commentary - World Food Day: A broader view on food security and nutrition

 By Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is Chairman of the Board of Directors, Nestlé S.A.

This commentary is part of a series organized by The Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative and the World Food Prize to examine the relationship between water, agriculture, and food security in the lead up to this year's Borlaug Dialogue.

As we mark World Food Day, we should seize the opportunity to reflect on the challenges we face. The conditions required to meet our fundamental need for food are far from basic and on the contrary, growing ever more complex. This is a subject that I will talk about in some detail tomorrow at the 2012 Borlaug Dialogue , as leading experts gather to consider ways to transform the global food security agenda.

If we are to secure enough food for all, we must start by taking a broader view that recognises the need to produce more food in a more resource-efficient way, particularly with regards to water as I have argued before on this blog. But we must also go beyond the issue of availability to enhance the quality of and knowledge about food – addressing the issue of nutrition.

Globally, we now face crises at both ends of the spectrum. With approximately 1.6 billion overweight and obese (according to the World Health Organisation), we have a crisis of ‘over nutrition’ whilst also struggling with the cause and consequences of acute under nutrition and micro-malnutrition.

With today’s food prices, the FAO estimates there are over one billion people who go to bed hungry and that since 2005 this number has been increasing. Added to this there is a new question about the quality of food, largely the lack of micronutrients that is affecting more than two billion people (WHO).

Commentary - Agricultural Productivity and Food Security: Global Optimism Checked by Regional Challenges

By Dr. Margaret M. Zeigler, Executive Director, Global Harvest Initiative

The Global Harvest Initiative’s (GHI) annual Global Agricultural Productivity Report® (GAP Report®), was released on October 17, before an audience of global thought leaders, agricultural industry experts, farmers, and international development professionals. This is the third annual GAP Report® released by GHI since the organization’s inception in 2009, and the first since my appointment as Executive Director.

As in 2010 and 2011, GHI has chosen the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, as the venue for the release of the 2012 GAP Report®.  The World Food Prize brings together farmers, professionals, companies and organizations across the value chain and offers them a unique opportunity to visit, collaborate and learn.  

That Dr. Daniel Hillel was awarded this year’s World Food Prize for his leadership and innovation in micro-irrigation has special significance, because not only does the 2012 GAP Report® focus on the state of global and regional agricultural productivity, but on solutions to improve agricultural productivity for food and nutrition security.  Dr. Hillel’s work in improving water productivity for agriculture is a perfect example of how innovation, technology, and collaboration can result in more sustainable solutions that use less of our planet’s finite natural resources and improve the lives of people.

GHI’s GAP Report® also features an updated GAP Index™, a unique benchmark that measures global agricultural productivity growth against demand growth. The GAP Index™ gives us a snapshot of the progress, or digression, in our ability to increase the rate of global agricultural productivity across the value chain, and to sustainably meet the needs of 9 billion people by 2050.

Commentary - Where Every Day Is Food Day

By Roger Thurow

Roger Thurow is a Senior Fellow on Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

This commentary is part of a series organized by The Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative and the World Food Prize to examine the relationship between water, agriculture, and food security in the lead up to this year's Borlaug Dialogue.

Today is World Food Day.  But, I wonder, do the farmers of Africa know it?

Actually, for them, every day is Food Day.  Food – growing it, scraping together enough money to buy it – is their daily preoccupation, a primal obsession.  Africa’s smallholder farmers – the most common occupation on the continent - rise every day to tend their plots, trying to squeeze enough out of the soil to feed their families throughout the year.  Most of the time, they fail, which is why they endure an annual Hunger Season.

When their cupboards are bare, they scramble for income to purchase food on the market.  There, prices march relentlessly higher as surpluses from the previous harvest dwindle.  The farmers may have to save their earnings for a couple of days before there is enough to buy a meal for the family.

In the Hunger Season, far too many days are No Food Day.

I wonder if Tesfaye Ketema in the Ethiopian highlands knows it is World Food Day.  I met him in during the famine of 2003; he was sitting on a flimsy mattress in an emergency feeding tent, praying that his emaciated little boy, Hagirso, would survive.  The year before, Tesfaye had carried bags of surplus corn to the same village square; now he had carried his starving son.  The markets failed before the weather did; the surplus production of the previous year overwhelmed the markets, triggering prices to collapse by 80% and sapping the farmers’ ability, and incentive, to sustain surplus production.  Then the drought hit.