Thinking Big by Starting Small
This Op-ed was printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
By Stephanie Hanson, Danielle Nierenberg, and Molly Theobald
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the fact that 1 billion people worldwide are going to bed hungry every night. And, in the United States, it is easy to look at sub-Saharan Africa – where the majority of people depend on agriculture for their livelihood but still do not get enough to eat – and want to just throw money at the problem. Or worse, to give up hope.
But when one talks to farmers on the ground in Kenya, Ghana, Madagascar, and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, it becomes clear that throwing money at the problem isn’t enough.
It’s not that funding isn’t needed. With increasing extreme weather events due to climate change, skyrocketing food prices, and the highest number of hungry people in human history, funding for agriculture to alleviate poverty and hunger is needed now more than ever. The new multibillion dollar U.S. food security and agriculture initiative, known as “Feed the Future,” is a timely recognition of this need.
But this money needs to be directed at the right kind of agriculture projects. Instead of silver-bullet, high-technology fixes, agriculture funding should focus on the many low-tech, African-led innovations that are already helping to alleviate hunger and poverty in environmentally sustainable ways all over the continent. As the global community looks for solutions to the problem of global hunger, it’s important to remember something that we’ve heard again and again: Farmers already know what they need.