Increasing the Productivity of the World’s Micro-farmers

Introduction Three quarters of the farmers in developing countries cultivate less than five acres. The productivity of these small farmers is the key to practical sustainable solutions to the growing problem of food security in the world. In light of this, it is remarkable that the critical needs of microfarmers have for so long been ignored, both by both the development establishment influenced powerfully by western bigness biases, and policy makers in developing countries focussed on large multi-million dollar projects. The adoption of high yielding seeds and fertilizer combined with access to irrigation has tripled the global grain harvest in the past 30 years. But the harvest of the microfarmers of the world has failed to keep up. The main constraint to tripling the harvest of small farmers like their larger farmer neighbors is absent access to affordable and divisible irrigation.