Guest Contributors

I want first to congratulate Rev. David Beckmann on winning the World Food Prize. This is an affirmation of Bread for the World’s work and all the tireless efforts of Bread for the World’s members and sympathizers. You deserve this and it is my hope that it energizes you and strengthens your commitment to poor and hungry people around the world.

At least 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population depends on agriculture in some way for their livelihoods. But most continue to live in extreme poverty, isolated from a market system that could provide real economic opportunities. The lack of functioning food markets has hampered broader economic development and continues to keep the region on the sidelines of the global economy.

Rwandan farmer Ezechias Rurahinyuza joined thousands of his neighbors in reshaping their steeply sloped fields this summer. Using hand tools, they crafted wide terraces to increase their arable space and create a water management system to slow the relentless erosion of their valuable top soil. Taking a brief break from his labor, Rurahinyuza surveyed the hills—and the future.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at CARE’s annual conference in May 2010, could not have made a stronger case for investing in maternal and child nutrition.

Poor rural producers—farmers, fishers, livestock keepers, entrepreneurs, and agricultural laborers—figure disproportionately among the world’s poor and hungry people. At the same time, they play a key role in helping meet the world’s expanding demand for food, fiber, and fuel.

ACDI/VOCA’s Kenya Maize Development Program (KMDP) offers important lessons on making food security programs work for the people they are meant to serve. The program nearly tripled—and in some places quadrupled—smallholder yields and increased the net earnings of some 370,000 farmers, nearly 30 percent of whom are women.

In the mid-1980s USAID directly employed 221 agricultural development officers. By 2010 the number had dropped by roughly 90 percent, paralleling the steep decline of the agency’s budgets for agriculture and food security. Retirements vastly exceeded the number of new hires, and those who entered USAID as agricultural officers soon realized where the opportunities for advancement and programmatic impact did not lie and moved into other fields within the agency.

Ty Piseth and his family have been farming in the Koh Kong province of Cambodia without title or deed for decades. Because the province is sparsely populated, the land is largely undeveloped. It is also located near the ocean, a location prized by commercial developers. Enter a large Chinese investment company that wants to develop a 36,000-hectare ocean-side tourist resort.

The Food Aid Convention (FAC) is a multilateral instrument that was set up to guarantee a minimum predictable annual disbursement of food aid. Over the years this largely unknown treaty has provided a ‘floor level’ of food aid, which has been important to organizations like the United Nations World Food Program.

There are few places on earth where the specter of climate change looms larger than in the densely packed, low-lying country of Bangladesh. The country is already vulnerable to extreme weather events, so the threat of rising sea levels, more erratic rainfall, and increasing seasonal floods raises new worries as Bangladesh struggles to spur economic development and lift people out of poverty.