Small farms, big results

OP-ED

October 14, 2011|By Frances Moore Lappé and Nikhil Aziz

Gilberto Silva, a Brazilian small farmer, holds up a cassava root that will… (Grassroots international )

FOR THREE decades the UN World Food Day on Oct. 16 has offered a ready-made opportunity to tackle hunger’s causes and solutions. Unfortunately, the conversation often focuses narrowly on ways to increase the food supply with purchased technologies originating far from farmers’ fields.

This focus isn’t working. The world produces more than enough for each of us to thrive. Yet the number of hungry people has hit all-time highs, now nearly 1 billion.

Globally, our core problem is not a lack of quantity of food but rather the destructive quality of human power relationships: The gross imbalances from the village level to that of international trade create hunger no matter how much we produce. So, what if we widened our focus? What if we began to see that much of the solution to hunger - along with an answer to a big piece of the climate conundrum - lies with some of the world’s poorest people, the small farmers themselves?

A half-billion small-farm families grow 70 percent of the world’s food, yet rural people also make up about half of the 925 million people going hungry. Evidence mounts that, even when starting with poor soils, many of these farms are dramatically increasing yields and income by using local resources and agro-ecological practices that build healthy soil and conserve water.

A recent overview by GRAIN magazine concludes that agro-ecological practices so enrich the soil’s carbon-holding capacity that, if widely used, could offset as much as a third of current global annual greenhouse gas emissions within 50 years.

Critical for ending hunger, such small-scale farming using agro-ecological approaches also begins to redress power imbalances: It frees farmers, and those who eat their food, from dependency on suppliers of commercial inputs. Using locally developed seeds, for example, farmers are freed from vulnerability to oligopoly power and price swings in a volatile global market where only 10 seed companies control 57 percent of sales.