Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people–more than 80 percent of the world’s population–have enough food to live healthy, productive lives.
Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world’s poorest countries.
In 2009, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), with support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, published “Millions Fed”.
This book identifies interventions in agricultural development that have substantially reduced hunger and food insecurity. “Millions Fed” documents evidence about where, when, and why these interventions succeeded and shares lessons to help inform future agricultural policy and investment decisions.
By identifying successes in agriculture that show a real and measurable impact on the lives of the world’s poorest people, “Millions Fed” demonstrated that improved agricultural development policy and investment decisions can substantially reduce hunger and poverty.
Successes in developing-country agriculture are extremely rich and diverse in nature, varying in time, space, and character. Some are successes that emerged for just a few short years to trigger long episodes of growth and development. Some have emerged from years of dogged persistence that yielded returns despite substantial risks, uncertainties, and doubts. Others have resulted from communities that took action to ensure their own survival under difficult environmental conditions. Still others are successes that were inspired by leaders and organizations who marshaled the resources needed to contain the spread of crop and livestock diseases that know no boundaries.
The pathways to success are also extremely varied. Some cases demonstrate how an improved crop variety or cultivation practice contributed to improving food security by increasing crop output per hectare of land, lowering production costs, or reducing crop losses caused by pests, diseases, drought, or soil erosion. Others demonstrate how new agricultural technologies improved the sustainable use of scarce resources like fertile soil and water, or enhanced the nutritional quality of food that people both cultivate and consume. Still others illustrate how changes in incentives—whether public policies, commercial regulations, or socioeconomic norms—encouraged farmers to produce more food, pursue more sustainable cultivation practices, and participate more actively in the marketplace.
But these pathways to success are not simply about increasing the physical supply of food. Rather, they are about reductions in hunger that result not only from an improvement in the physical availability of food, but also from a change in an individual’s ability to secure quality food. This change may result from any number of situations: an improvement in an individual’s ability to produce food within the farm household; an increase in income that provides a consumer with greater purchasing power in the market; or a shift in norms that reduces the impact of practices and behaviors that limit an individual’s entitlement to food within the household, community, or society. (More)
Download “Millions Fed” in PDF:
- English – Higher res version – 5.7MB
- English – Smaller file version – 2.3MB
- Français – 6.1MB
- Chinese – 1.9MB
- Spanish – 1.5MB
- Hindi – 7.2MB (from the APAARI website)
This post is part of our series celebrating “40 years of CGIAR”