International Agri Policy marginalizes farmers
By admin on Apr 16, 2010 in Agriculture and Globalization, Family Farming, Small Farmers to Market
FarmFriday shares this interesting newsbit from IPS. This highlights again the need to support agriculture in general and smallholder farmers in particular.
IPS|By Stephen Leahy
How’s this for short-sighted: A billion people go hungry every day, food prices have climbed 30 to 40 percent, climate change is reducing agricultural production – and for the past two decades, the world has slashed investments in publicly-funded agriculture until it is a pittance in most countries.
“Moral outrage is needed. We must abolish this… It can be done. It must be done,” Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt and a former World Bank economist, told nearly 700 World Food Prize laureates, ministers, scientists and a few representatives from development and farmer organisations at the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) last month here in southern France.
“This is the launching pad to transform hunger in our time,” Serageldin concluded.
The “rocket” on the launching pad is a major transformation of the 500 million dollars of public funds for international agricultural research carried out by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an alliance comprising some 8,000 researchers in 100 countries.
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