Tag Archives: population

Smallholder Farmers Key to Feeding Growing Population

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It was one year ago today that the world population estimate hit 7 billion. Here at Heifer International, we’re continuing our work of helping smallholder farmers around the world learn sustainable agriculture practices, increase their family’s nutrition and income and contribute to community and economic development. Empowering smallholder farmers, especially women, to grow more food more sustainably is the best solution to ending hunger and poverty worldwide.

Smallholder Farmers in Bangladesh

Josna Begam (middle) winnows rice with her mother, Monara Begam, in Johari, Natore, Bangladesh. Photo by Geoff Bugbee, courtesy of Heifer International.

Eighty percent of the developing world’s food is raised on about half a billion small farms.

An interesting, though long, read is “Sustainable smallholder agriculture: Feeding the world, protecting the planet” from the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In it, IFAD validates what Heifer has known for a long time.

Farmers face two stark realities over the next four decades: They must produce 70 per cent more food by 2050 to feed a growing, more urbanized population, and they must do so facing the likelihood that arable land in developing countries will increase by no more than 12 per cent. That monumental challenge can be met only if sustainability is the foundation of approaches to food security and poverty reduction in every country and every community. No other strategy has a hope of feeding current populations while protecting and restoring the natural resources that future generations will need to support their livelihoods.

Viewing the agriculture sector as renewable rather than extractive is the only way forward. This approach embraces the idea that agriculture is an interaction with wider ecosystems, while it simultaneously improves livelihood options for those who farm the world’s approximately 500 million smallholdings. In the long term, there is no trade-off between production and sustainability. In fact, the opposite is true: without sustainability, production will suffer.

On the anniversary of the world’s population reaching 7 billion, it’s good to take stock and remember where we’re headed: to 9 billion or so by 2050. If we want a chance at ensuring a decent, healthy life for each of those 9 billion, we must continue to invest in the world’s smallholder farmers.

Heifer Inspires Rural Youth to Stay Put

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The migration of young people from rural areas to urban in the hope of a better future is common worldwide. This is understandable in many ways, but it can have negative effects overall (urban slums; overloaded urban infrastructure; and an absence of young rural innovators, farmers, caretakers, etc.) What we’ve often seen in our work, however, is that young people engaged in Heifer projects often choose to stay in their rural communities. Doing so allows them to not only remain with their families, but also give back to the community that helped raise them. Clara Alanya of Peru is a great example of this phenomenon.

Clara Alanya is a young leader who has made a difference in her community. Her view of rural life and devotion to her work have enabled her to rise above the exclusion and chauvinism still common in the small farming community of Buenos Aires in Huancavelica, the poorest region in Peru.

Clara grew up in a family that imbued its members with strong values. The oldest of five children, Clara says she felt it was her responsibility to set a good example for her siblings.

When she was 19, her father took her to all the training workshops that the Peruvian Social Studies Center organized in their community. In those workshops, Clara began to think about the potential for development in her community and the possibilities for emphasizing local production and strengthening rural community organizations.

Certain that happiness and success are not to be found only in large cities, she decided to stay and take advantage of all the workshops offered in her community, unlike many young people who migrate to work outside their communities, scorning rural life.

“I went to all the workshops about how to build improved stoves, raise guinea pigs, keep a family garden and raise chickens, and my family and I made changes to our house to make it a healthy home. Now I know all about how to build an improved stove. My neighbors ask me to teach them, and I do it with pleasure.

At such a young age, however, it wasn’t easy to convince others to recognize her leadership. She had to persevere, participating in community assemblies, before she was respected as an outstanding young member of the community.

In 2010, she began participating in a Heifer project called Training Communities to Exercise their Rights to Natural Resources. Clara and other promoters from 40 rural communities received training on legal issues, developing skills for defending rights related to land ownership, water use, food security and climate change.

Clara now shares her knowledge voluntarily, facilitating workshops in her community and neighboring communities.

“I used to be afraid to talk in front of a group, but I lost my fear little by little, thanks to the training workshops. I’ve gained more confidence with the Heifer project, because the facilitators trust me. Now when older people say, ‘Why is she going to teach us? She’s so young!’ I don’t even resent it, because many people do support me and I show them everything I’ve learned.

Clara’s family has also become an example tot he entire community, confronting poverty with perseverance, understanding, and above all, family unity.

“What we do in my family is talk things over. My parents don’t make any decisions without consulting all the members of the family. That way we all agree, and we support each other in everything.

Now 23, Clara is a young woman with many dreams, who is committed to working for her community. She has shown that the most important step toward progress is to shake off the lethargy brought on by conformity and hopelessness, and envision a better future.

7 Billion Mouths to Feed: Small Farmers are Still the Answer

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Today the world’s population hit 7 billion. That’s 7 billion humans who need food and water to survive, let alone thrive.

I live in Little Rock, a small southern city whose metro area population is less than 700,000. It’s really hard for me to imagine what 7 billion people means on a day-to-day basis.

This video from National Geographic helps put 7 billion into perspective.

It really is about balance, not space. Inequity in the distribution and use of the world’s resources is the problem. The only way to see improvements in the quality of life for the global population will be through a more equitable distribution of resources (food, water, money, power, and so on). At Heifer, we approach this problem in two ways. First, we help redistribute financial resources. We take the generous gifts of our donors and turn them into livestock, seeds, equipment, training and so on. Second, we help our participants–largely the rural poor–make the absolute best use of what resources they do have.

Earlier this year, Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food reported that sustainable, agroecological farming will be the answer to feeding the expected 9 billion people to live on our planet in 2050. A post on Impatient Optimists, the blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stated:

At the Foundation, we believe that smallholder-based productivity growth is the most leveraged pathway by which we can address poverty reduction. Of the 1.4 billion people who live in extreme poverty and almost 1 billion are estimated to be chronically undernourished, approximately three quarters live in rural areas; and an overwhelming majority of these poor participate in agriculture. By focusing on smallholders’ productivity we address not only poverty but also undernutrition.

Supporting smallholder farmers engaged in sustainable agriculture is what we do at Heifer. And we have plans to do this even bigger and with greater impact. But it’s not enough. There have to be more of us working to end hunger and poverty while protecting the Earth. Doing nothing is unacceptable. Doing nothing leads to 15 million children dying every year from hunger. Doing nothing leaves children who survive starvation grossly stunted.

7 billion people aren’t the problem.

We are the solution.

Happy Birthday to the United Nations

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Today, October 24, is United Nations Day. On this date in 1945, the Charter of the United Nations was put into force, officially establishing the international organization we know as the UN.

So what do our friends at the UN. want for their 66th birthday? They want us to join in a campaign by the UN Population Fund, called 7 Billion Actions. It doesn’t cost anything, so head on over and share your story. Why? Because by the end of this month, the world’s population will reach 7 billion strong:

How Heifer is Helping the World Feed Itself

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Earlier today I posted about a Heifer project participant being included in The Economist’s report, The 9 billion-people question: A special report on feeding the world. And if you’re keyed in to media coverage of sustainable agriculture, you’ve probably seen the conversation around the web on the United Nations Report, Agroecology and the Right to Food (Mark Bittman has written about it on the New York Times Opinionator blog, and Paula Crossfield for Huffington Post, to name a couple).
Both reports look at the seemingly impossible challenge of feeding all 9 billion people who are estimated to be living on Earth by 2050, and they offer different perspectives. Will we feed the world by investing in the highest-yielding crop or livestock species? Or by investing in agroecology? (Heifer has been practicing agroecology all over the world since the mid 1980s and established an Agroecology Initiative in 2000.)
I worry, though, that the theme of “feeding the world” diverts our attention from the local, on-the-ground work that needs to be done. Heifer takes on the task of ending hunger and poverty with this sort of community approach, and it’s an approach that we’ve proven works.
Ours is a bottom-up approach. We work with the very poor to help them rebuild assets and develop agriculturally and economically active livelihoods. We build strong community groups where people work together to share their limited resources and to plan their vision of a better life. At this stage, much training takes place. Participants learn improved ways to tend animals, how to best use animal by-products, water management and erosion control practices, and often even improved literacy and leadership skills.
A transformation process begins to happen within the community when the members realize that improvements in knowledge lead to improvements in health, income, relationships and eventually to their values. We call this a holistic transformation.
Once this transformation is underway, the community uses their knowledge to impact the policies, systems and practices that impact their surroundings (both societal and environmental). Community empowerment at the grassroots level can lead to changes in infrastructure to help build local commerce–roads, electricity, commodity storage and transportation, as well as market associations and structures.
We’ve seen our model work again and again, in all corners of the world (and even in our own backyard). Our challenge now is to ratchet up this model so we can begin to see our impacts on a larger scale, as we have with our East Africa Dairy Development Project. As communities begin to feed themselves, international hunger statistics will begin to come down. The need for wealthy countries to ship commodities to poor countries will decrease–countries will be growing their own food.
Left: Bolivia (photo by Geoff Bugbee), Top: Cambodia (photo by Matt Bradley)
Botton: Armenia (photo by Russ Powell), Right: Zambia (photo by Jake Lyell
And then the question of whether conventional agriculture is more productive or if sustainable/organic/agroecological agriculture is better will become a non-issue.
Can we do it alone? Of course not. We need help from individuals like you, from partner nonprofits and non-government organizations, and from governments–wealthy and poor alike.

7,000,000,000

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The Population Reference Bureau projects that world population will pass 7 billion in 2011. Where is much of the growth occurring? In poorer countries, where it is “exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment,” according to William P. Butz, the president of PRB. Is human population the elephant in the room when it comes to discussing hunger and poverty?