Meet the man who changed the way the U.S. fights poverty abroad [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://grist.org/food/meet-the-man-who-changed-the-way-the-u-s-fights-poverty-abroad/

"What should we pay for with our foreign aid? In recent history, the American answer to that question has been simple — “health programs.” But then Obama named Raj Shah head of the United States Agency for International Development where it was his job to spend our foreign aid. Shah steered more money to farmers, especially small farmers, and over the course of five years saw the results all over the world: Some of the poorest people were able to feed their families, send their kids to school, and save up money.

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I’ve met families in Guatemala where children who used to work in the fields are now going to school because their fields produce more. You see how these investments help address the deprivation that I saw and became my life sense of purpose, in that very first visit to that rural south Indian village.

Why is it important to invest in agriculture? Can you lay out the case for that?

It’s actually very simple. If you look at relatively poor agrarian economies you find that 60-plus percent of the employment, or as I like to call it, underemployment, is still in the agricultural sector. And when you have that much of society’s effort focused on feeding itself it’s hard to get other things done. Country after country around the world has gone from everybody focused on feeding themselves, to a modern diversified economy with a smaller group of food producers. That pathway has been the key to reducing hunger and poverty in nearly every country around the world, including the United States.

How is that focus on fixing agrarian poverty working?

In Feed the Future, they are focused on some 19 economies that are still far too agrarian, where economic growth rates before the program were zero to two percent. They said, let’s increase investment in our agriculture. As expected, you are starting to see a rapid reduction in rural poverty, in the percentage of children who are stunted, and in the total number of people that don’t get 2,100 calories a day. Those are rough indicators of a large-scale transformation starting to occur.

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Hugely important work, and another reason we have to stop Trump.