South African emerging farmers
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Food_security
Can Small Farmers Feed the World? « Marc F. Bellemare
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) posted a link on its Twitter feed yesterday to a document entitled “ Smallholders Can Feed the World .” Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the document really is mostly a marketing brochure for IFAD’s activities, but the document is not completely devoid of interest. Indeed, it discusses how smallholders can actually feed the world when they are integrated in agricultural value chains. It gives the example of Ahmad Abdelmunem Al-Far, an Egyptian who “[a]fter joining an IFAD-supported project, Ahmad received a plot of 2.1 hectares of newly reclaimed desert. The project introduced a credit fund, systems for sewage and refuse disposal, and drip irrigation.
By Kofi A. Annan Efforts to end poverty and provide food security need urgently to be accelerated. This is even more important today when prices for food and other basic commodities have risen sharply. They have now passed the peak in 2008 which sparked the last food crisis and caused such misery for the most vulnerable in the world. The FAO has warned that the high cost of food is a serious threat to global growth and social stability.
