During 2002-2006, I led the United Nations Millennium Project, which aimed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, for then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. One cornerstone of the project was “smallholder farmers,” meaning peasant farm families in Africa, Latin America, and Asia – working farms of around one hectare (2.5 acres) or less. These are some of the poorest households in the world, and, ironically, some of the hungriest as well, despite being food producers.

They are hungry because they lack the ability to buy high-yield seeds, fertilizer, irrigation equipment, and other tools needed to increase productivity. As a result, their output is meager and insufficient for their subsistence. Their poverty causes low farm productivity, and low farm productivity reinforces their poverty. It’s a vicious circle, technically known as a poverty trap.

The UN Millennium Project’s Hunger Task Force, led by two world-leading scientists, M. S. Swaminathan and Pedro Sanchez, examined how to break this vicious circle.

The Hunger Task Force determined that Africa could substantially increase its food production if help was given to smallholder farmers, in the form of agricultural inputs. 

The Millennium Project recommended a big increase in global funding for this purpose.  Drawing on that work and related scientific findings, Annan launched a call in 2004 for an African Green Revolution, based on an expanded partnership between Africa and donor countries.

Now the key is to make this effort work. The lessons of history are clear. Getting seed and fertilizer to smallholder farmers at highly subsidized prices (or even free in some cases) will make a lasting difference. Not only will food yields rise in the short term, but farm households will use their higher incomes and better health to accumulate all sorts of assets: cash balances, soil nutrients, farm animals, and their children’s health and education.

That boost in assets will, in turn, enable local credit markets, such as micro-finance, to begin operating. Farmers will be able to buy inputs, either out of their own cash, or by borrowing against their improved creditworthiness.

Not surprisingly, many UN agencies and aid agencies in rich countries fight this approach.

All too often, the fight is about turf, rather than about the most effective way to speed help to the poor. Obama, Rudd, Zapatero, and other forward-thinking leaders can therefore make a huge difference by following up on their pledges at the G8 and insisting that the aid really works. The bureaucracies must be bypassed to get help to where it is needed: in the soil tilled by the world’s poorest farm families.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York.
In cooperation with Project Syndicate