WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran with Earth Institute director and leading economist Jeffrey Sachs (right) during the Millennium Promise event.
New York -- Meeting the Millennium Development Goals, particularly the most urgent one – to reduce the proportion of hungry people in the world by half by 2015 – requires not just shared vision and commitment but shared action on the ground. Today the solutions to ending hunger and poverty often involve a whole range of players working together in innovative ways.
This is particularly true of the Purchase for Progress (P4P) pilot initiative that brings together the purchasing power of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with the technical expertise of other partners to help smallholder farmers produce better quality food and crops and access markets.Together with Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, and leader of the Millennium Villages Programme, I have this week discussed with experts from governments, the private sector and non-governmental organisations how P4P is building on WFP’s local procurement of food commodities to help raise farmers’ incomes and help break the cycle of hunger and dependancy.
P4P is transforming lives and empowering rural communities by enabling small scale farmers to invest and plan. More secure revenues from quality-oriented markets help farmers to plan ahead as well as invest in the health and education of their families. Schemes to provide maize shellers to farmers in Zambia, warehouse receipt systems in Uganda and demonstration plots for women farmers in Guatemala, are helping raise incomes and defeat hunger.
We are now two years in to P4P with its ambitious target of changing the lives of 500,000 small farmers – most of whom are women. As Juana de los Angeles Cabrera, a member of the farmer’s cooperative AGRISAL in El Salvador, told a recent briefing for donors in Rome. “We are no longer subsistence farmers – we are now simply farmers! Now, we do business !” she said
