Empowering small farmers to increase productivity, improve crop quality and access reliable markets is critical to addressing global hunger and poverty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
The majority of small-holder farmers in Africa are women and, in urban areas, you're primarily looking at women-led households. So we can't solve hunger if we don't have gender-sensitive programming that addresses access to opportunities for women, whether it's through education or tools for cooking, like solar-powered stoves.
To me, the most critical thing in agriculture is investing in the peasant agriculture, transforming peasant agriculture.
To get the most from agricultural resources, poor farmers' needs must come first, guiding investment strategies and forming the yardstick for gauging results.
To affordably feed the next billion people, we must have higher-yielding crops with even greater nutritional value. America should be at the vanguard of the innovative advances that will make this happen.
People are hungry not because there aren't enough farmers or food, but because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.
The reasons for food insecurity are many and varied. But part of the problem is the global farming systems.
Programs that pay farmers not to farm often devastate rural areas. The reductions hurt everyone from fertilizer companies to tractor salesmen.
Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we've lost our manufacturing, we've lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.