SUAREZ: Now increasingly in many parts of the world, along with smallholders, people who actually own their land or have some sort of title, there are millions who work the land but are not owners.  Do you need a different approach for them?  Are they part of the solution as well?

NARAYAN:  They are.  Again coming back to India because that’s what I’ve been looking at recently, is there is a large percentage of landless laborers and so what the government has done and this is again initiated by civil society groups, they’ve taken fallow land, land that has not been planted, and leased it to groups of poor people, provided them with some agricultural know-how and within a couple of years this land is producing.  They are producing enough food to feed themselves as well as surpluses.  There’s one other feature that’s combined that’s very important to combat hunger and to get good prices for crops which is very small scale local graneries that India has one of the world’s largest public food distribution programs in which 25% of the grain is lost through infestation and rats, etc. and it doesn’t get to people.  So when food storage gets decentralized people are able to manage that surplus by loaning it as -- there are credit lines now for rice – and these are very poor people but also their values and culture as such that when they borrow they set aside a little for ones who are even more destitute than them.

SUAREZ:  Ms. Clayton when a good idea is developed at the grassroots’ level, is there a mechanism for scaling it up so farmers even in that same country over the next hill, in the same province, in the same state, can find out about it?

CLAYTON:   There are.  In fact the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, has the special program for food security.  What they recognized is that there was enough just to institute these innovative programs to provide the technical assistance where they need to scale it up rather than to help 8,000, they need to help 80,000 because the advantage is that if you are trying to fight hunger is not only would they feed their families but they would also feed other families.  So if you are really trying to get at national hunger or world hunger, 850 million people you heard remain to be hungry, you can’t make the kind of impact with small-scale projects, but the innovation coming from small-scale farmers and their survival skills are the kinds of skills that you need to transfer and international organization, international UN organizations, are mechanisms by which they can be upscaled.

SUAREZ:  Does the central government have to become involved or is there a way of doing this kind work, replicating good ideas in other places that can bypass having to go through the central government?

CLAYTON:  Working through the Food and Agriculture Organization we are obligated to work with member governments.  Sometimes that’s problematic but those are still the rules and so you try to work with the minister of agriculture, hoping that they see the value in the innovation of involving the small-scale farmers.  But also FAO has the opportunity of working with other international organizations that may not be governmental.  We work with the World Bank; we work with other NGOs that are providing technical assistance; we work with the Peace Corps.  We work with other international non-profit organizations here in the United States who are providing direct assistance.  So the collaborations between other international organizations whether they are governmental or not allows for the upscaling.  We cannot go directly to an NGO and say we will not work with the minister  of agriculture because that minister of agriculture is a member of our organization.  And the UN, as you all know, is member driven.  It doesn’t mean that we are only to work with government but it does mean that you need to find innovative ways and I personally believe it is better when civil society and government work together.  However, when you have an uncaring government, I think it is civil society that takes the challenge and makes a difference whether it is a church organization, an institution NGO.  And they put pressure on their government to be more responsive to their citizens.  A lot of innovation comes from government.

SUAREZ:  Do they put pressure on their governments to be more responsive?

ARIGBEDE:  Oh yes, whether they succeed with the pressure or not is something else. 

SUAREZ:  What are the barriers to that happening? 

ARIGBEDE:  The barriers are first of all political barriers.  The system through which governments are influenced is so tortuous, so complex that the ordinary farmers by themselves would not easily be able to cope with it.  But we must keep coming back to the self-organization of farmers themselves and the role they can play.  Because once they do this, if you look at a country like Nigeria now, the leaders of farmers are no longer the non-literate but very wise old farmers -- if you like bureaucrats who have retired and have nothing to do and have become medium-scale farmers themselves and are suffering what the small-scale farmers are suffering.  They provide a kind of leadership that can articulate what the farmers want.

SUAREZ:  Because they know how to talk to the government?

ARIGBEDE:  That’s right, they know the ropes.  And then you have young people that we are now struggling to bring because there is no future for agriculture unless young people come on stage and very forcefully.  These young people are highly trained people, usually frustrated by the system.  A lot of them end up being unemployed and unemployable in fact.  Now these have gradually come into farmers organizations and they become a very vital tool for getting the perspective of the farmers heard and respected, for supporting farmers because they are at the end of the whole show, they are like starters.  They are the small starter it cannot run a car but it can start that big engine.  This is the relationship we have seen.  So we already have now in place small starters that are very vital to spark off the big engine that moves government.  It is when farmers themselves in their masses, strong organizations, say to government this is what we think is wise, this is the way you must go, and if you do not go this way, we will not vote for you the next time.  That’s one way of putting on very mild pressure.  Or if the government is not listening, OK, a little more pressure.  We produce the food.  If the food doesn’t get to the cities, government will be in trouble.  So there are ways of encouraging government, but you need a strong, organized body of farmers.

SUAREZ:  If the food doesn’t get to the city, governments will be in trouble.  But along with the food getting to the city, farmers are also getting there.  People are abandoning the land in their millions.  If you go to the cities of the developing world, it’s full of people who are scraping together a living, but they used to be farmers.

CLAYTON:  There is the challenge.  I think the challenge is how do we make the majority of the people who live in rural areas food secure.  And you can’t make them food secure unless you upscale the large number of peasant farmer families who are trying to eke out a living for themselves and their neighbors.  You also have to find employment so I think the challenge is to those of us who want to make impact in world hunger is that we have to find how we develop rural communities around the world.  It is not unfamiliar to us in the US.  Most of us are moving out of rural areas in the US to go find better things and the brighter lights.  But the challenge for world hunger is more severe in rural areas of Nigera, rural areas of India.  I was in India. Again in the villages around the times they were producing foods and when they would be low in their foods they would know they would have to walk somewhere to buy food, or if the rice that the government is sending will arrive.  If there wasn’t a distribution system so they could get the rice to the school, these persons would develop systems of getting it to the school by the way that sometime they support it.  So in rural areas to make sure you had clean water or clean food or fuel, people had to organize or they left.  You either found innovative ways to survive or you would just move from that system.  So you have to reward the innovation, support that, or otherwise the cities are getting too large.  And that’s creating another crisis that’s unimaginable because they go there and they can’t find work and they live in slums and that makes it more critical.