The long road to food security
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As a result, yields are generally too low to allow the millions of rural households to generate marketable surpluses. Even if smallholders are able to produce a surplus, their lack of access to downstream activities, such as processing and marketing, prevents them from selling it easily.
The cause of these missing, but vital, resources lies in the shameful neglect of agriculture in the past two decades. Both developed and developing countries - caught up in rapid economic expansion and technological development - got distracted. They turned off the tap to agriculture, leaving small farmers to rely on basic farming practices and on government and donor handouts.
That tap must be turned back on. In IFAD's experience, working simply to double the income of a smallholder farmer who scrapes by on less than $1 a day is poverty management, because at $2 a day, he or she still remains poor.
But supporting that smallholder in launching a farming business that could generate a five-fold increase in income amounts to poverty eradication.
If smallholder farmers are to be given the opportunity to become viable businesses, it is essential that they be connected to markets. Indeed, support for rural infrastructure - including last-mile roads, electrification, post-harvest facilities, support for agricultural associations and cooperatives, and access to land and irrigation facilities - is a crucial element in the value chain.
Each link in the value chain, from the smallholder to the local trade agents and agro-processors to regional and national markets, needs to be strengthened.
We need to link food producers with the people who need their product through viable and well maintained infrastructure.
In addition, we need to provide them with research and technology to ensure that they can grow the best-quality produce, and storage capabilities so that they can sell at peak prices.
If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, they will not only be able to feed themselves and their communities, but will contribute to wider food security.
We just need to put the pavement down so that farmers like those I saw in Zambia can more easily make their way on the road to food security.
The author is president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Project Syndicate
