Panellists debate the future of smallholder farmers

A dramatic rise in investments in rural areas of the developing world would go a long way to slow the exodus from rural communities and reduce global poverty and hunger, according to panellists taking part in the recent BBC World debate “Failing the farmer?”

“What we need is to dramatically expand investments in smallholder farming,” said Kevin Cleaver, Assistant President of IFAD and one of 14 international panellists taking part. “If you invest in rural roads, in water supply, in animal health, in agricultural extension and research, we know it works.”

Produced in partnership with IFAD and the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), “Failing the farmer?” was hosted by BBC World presenter Nik Gowing, who guided panellists through some of the most pressing issues confronting small farmers today. In addition to the need for greater investments in rural areas, for example, panellists debated the impact of agricultural subsidies, commodity price controls, fair trade, the controversy over genetically modified crops and the neglect of agriculture in national development agendas.

On the issues of investment in rural areas, Ducan Greene, Head of Policy at Oxfam, described the dramatic fall in Official Development Assistance throughout the 1990s as having created “a state of criminal neglect in agriculture”.

Greene said many donors at the time concluded that since poor people worked in agriculture the solution was to “get rid of agriculture and people would cease to be poor.”

An infusion of funding is needed not only from donor countries and the private sector, said some panellists, but from developing countries themselves. According to statistics compiled by the World Food Programme, developing countries invest between 5 to 10 percent of their annual budgets on agricultural development while between 60 to 80 percent of their populations live in rural areas and depend on farming for a living.

“Governments cannot abdicate their responsibility to trans-national corporations or to donors,” said Makanjuola Olaseinde Arigbede of the Union of Small and Medium Scale Farmers of Nigeria.