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Big Business, Hunger, and putting farmers first

Sara Wolcott | Monday 16th November 2009

"The world faces two big challenges: how to ensure food security (including ending hunger) and how to feed a growing population." That's not a quote from an NGO - that's a quote from Howard Minigh, President and CEO of CropLife International, who spoke to me about businesses growing role in the global fight against hunger. Big business is talking about sustainable development- and it doesn't look like it is just talk.

CropLife International is a collection of Big Companies engaged in plant science - that's fertilizer, biotechnology, improved seeds, and other agricultural inputs. CropLife mostly focuses on encouraging policy that supports some of these big companies - names that you are probably with even if you are not a farmer, such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Dupont. Part of CropLife has been to support the process not only of driving policy that is supportive of the plant scientists, but also in working with USAID to support farmers and communities in Latin America to train them about safe and appropriate use of pesticides to reduce the risks to those communities - a necessity if one is to take the principles of sustainable development seriously.

Known in some circles as being primarily profit driven, these companies are part of the relatively new public-private-farmers-scientists partnership, Farmers First, which places the farmer at the heart of the solution to many of our developmental and food security problems. I've been impressed with - and covered - the work this coalition has been doing for the past year or so.

Minigh just spoke to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at their current conference in Rome about the importance of finding common goals to work together with the private sector. He pointed to the work that Farmers First has done as an excellent example of multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary work.

Jim Butler, the Deputy Director of FAO, has been encouraging that organization to work more closely with big business (and medium and small businesses.) Minigh welcomes this shift. 'It's really important to reach out to the private sector. We bring a lot of skills in management, resources, knowledge of how sustainable business models work. We've been bypassed in the past, and it has not worked very well. We welcome this new conversation."

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