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In my first pilot project with Plant Breeders Without Borders, I was asked to go to Ethiopia to train small farmers to grow their own forage crops for countries developing the dairy industry. Ethiopia has experienced many famines, and with a population of nearly 80 million people in a good year, everyone can be fed, but in a bad year many people can go hungry.
While I was there, I thought: why didn’t the seed companies settle in Ethiopia to sell seeds?
Africa is predicted to be the fastest growing continent in the coming decades. When a famine breaks out, a lot of seed is given to people as leaflets. This makes it impossible for a company to try to sell seeds when they are distributed for free.
What is most frustrating for locals is that most of the seed delivered is not from Africa, but from Western countries. Although this is fine for Western farmers who would receive the full market price for their seeds that are used as foreign aid, this can have devastating effects on the local market price in the famine region. There may be neighboring countries where famine has not occurred, and their local seed price decreases due to free seed coming from abroad. It would make sense for aid organizations to try to access seeds from neighboring countries so that local prices are not affected.
The greatest help that the western world can provide to developing countries is free access to markets. When traveling to developing countries, it is common to see that products from the western world are sold in markets and reduce the local price. It may have been an oversupply of the product in the western world, which then floods into developing markets. Unfortunately, if the roles were reversed, this could not happen. When there is an oversupply of agricultural products in developing countries, they tend to be seen to rot. In the western world, there are trade tariffs and restrictions that prevent overseas imports that could flood the market and damage the price received by local farmers.
What is the solution? We know that the world today can produce enough food to feed everyone, but it is not evenly distributed. Perhaps we need an international body to analyze food production on a global scale. In times of food shortages in certain places, they can help aid agencies identify where food is grown most locally and that’s a surplus. It also means that food does not have to travel long distances for the consumer, which means fewer food miles.
There is a place for brochures in times of famine. However, after the famine has passed, $ 1 spent on hunger prevention means that it takes $ 3 less to spend in times of famine as handouts. So the question is: what is hunger prevention? Perhaps it is people’s education to have the confidence to run their own business and produce seeds for the local consumer. When you travel to developing countries, it is the broker in the market that is making the most money.
This system needs to be revised to allow farmers to be more profitable. Cooperative formation can help with this. Or perhaps you are making loans to small farmers so that they can buy what they need to produce a crop and then repay the loan with interest. You can now see social credit unions in the western world, where people are willing to invest their money in projects where they know that their returns will not be as good as investing in other projects, but the social impact will be much greater.
There is only one constant in life and that is change. Humanity can create solutions to the problems we face. We simply must be willing to work together to help make these solutions work.
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