Ending hunger requires wholehearted commitment from Public and Private sector actors
Imelda Hicoombolwa, a smallholder farmer in Zambia, is receiving help from the World Food Programme to grow crops after a severe drought last year. Credit : Guillem Sartorio/AFP/Getty
Ceres2030 is an international research consortium with the vision to end hunger and increase agricultural income and productivity for small-scale producers. The team reviewed several thousands of Ag research articles and reported several shocking findings. 95% of agricultural research publicationsthey assessed were not relevant to the needs of smallholders and their families. Only around 10% of these publications reviewed existing agricultural practices on farmer’s fields and most of the included studies only involved researchers without any participation from farmers. On a positive note, they reported that funding for “Sustainable solution to end hunger” in the private sector has grown substantially over the last four decades, with more than 50% of all funding now coming from agribusinesses.
So why do we see this shift towards private funding and why aren’t more public researchers answering practical questions that are relevant to smallholder farmers? One reason they bring up is the fact that practical applied research involving working with smallholder farmers doesn’t immediately boost an academic career. Many researchers such as at CGIAR do work with smallholder farmers, but in larger, research-intensive universities, small is becoming less desirable. Increasingly, university policies unfortunately steer their academics towards bid for larger prestigious grants. National research agencies, because they are the major funding source for researchers in universities and publishers also bear some responsibility. Often smallholder-farming research might not be considered sufficiently original, globally relevant or world-leading for grant support or journal publication.
Liverpool-Tasie and colleagues also confirmed that commercial businesses play a growing role in bringing technology and practical solutions to smallholder farmers. Private sector platforms that serve as one-stop shops to secure quality seed and other inputs, training, credit and a guaranteed market are emerging in developing countries. According to these studies, the majority of these additional services provided by output market channels and vendors of seed, fertilizer and crop protection products, was beneficial to small farmers and not exploitative as suggested by the old seventies literature, where sometimes companies were portrayed to charge unfair prices or offer advances of credit to farmers and then gouged them with exorbitant implicit interest rates. Although an increase in private sector investment is certainly a step in the right direction, industry partners need to be willing to share risks and opportunities, costs and knowledge, while complying with agreed principles that ensure sustainable solutions to end hunger, besides corporate returns.
These researchers are to be congratulated for reporting this overarching finding: that most published research on hunger is of little practical use in the goal to make hunger a thing of the past. Achieving the SDG to end hunger will require an order of magnitude more investments by both public and private sector actors, more cross-sectoral collaboration and public-private coordination and last but not least, more practical research engagement with and not just about smallholders and their families.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00621-2#MOESM1
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02849-6#ref-CR6
