Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you can feed him for a lifetime. But create markets for those fish, and he'll have sustainable income for his entire family.
After recently spending five weeks traveling across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania visiting men and women farmers, I saw firsthand the truth of this old saying — or at least, the modernized version.
Despite substantial improvements in recent decades, about 2.37 billion people worldwide face moderate or severe food insecurity. That number increased by 320 million just since the start of the pandemic.
Food insecurity and hunger are caused by a variety of factors, but it is typically not from an overall, global lack of food but rather a lack of financial resources due to infrastructure and logistic challenges, as well as a lack of markets. Hundreds of millions of people live in extreme poverty worldwide, and they often cannot afford to put enough nutritious food on the table for their families. Many of them live in small farming communities.
Top companies in developing countries — especially in Africa, where the problem is most acute — could help end hunger in those villages by partnering with local farmers. And NGOs and government officials can facilitate those partnerships.
Agriculture is the dominant profession among Africans. Over 60% of the sub-Saharan African population works on small farms.
Big companies — whether multinational or domestic — across the continent all need agricultural products. Airlines, for instance, require huge quantities of food for in-flight meals. If companies sourced their food from small farmers, it would infuse cash into village economies and strike a blow against poverty and hunger.
But right now, large companies mostly shun those small local farmers, due to logistical and regulatory barriers as well as concerns about quality control.
Local farms are, almost by definition, quite small. That means big companies would need to contract with many farmers to fulfill large orders, which can be a bit of a hassle. Complicating matters further, the small farms' products and practices are not standardized. Some farmers use fertilizer, others do not. They use different seeds and planting methods. The end results all look very different from one another.
Big companies want products that are consistently high quality, available, and traceable. That's why they tend to source their products from larger, commercialized operations, start their own farms, or even import them from abroad. But local farmers could ultimately deliver that quality — if they develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities to produce the caliber of product that the market demands.
I serve as the CEO of the nonprofit Rise Against Hunger. For years, we have worked with communities and in-country partners on projects that bolster the agriculture production and incomes of farmers. And we're now exploring a new approach, determining how we can better position small farmers to sell to large corporations. Moving forward, we're looking to help farmers cooperatives train local producers to improve their product quality, supply chain, and traceability records.
Other humanitarian organizations can join us in exploring and implementing this approach. Already, USAID and Ethiopian Airlines have announced a partnership to help local farmers contract with that national carrier. And African governments could help by offering incentives for companies to buy from small local farmers — similar to how the United States incentivizes corporate social responsibility by exempting charitable donations from taxation.
NGOs have been trying to combat hunger in Africa for a long time. They have always set forth with good intentions.
But too often, they have sought to merely give people "fish" rather than empowering them to use the rods and bait they already have more effectively. Helping tens of millions of African farmers expand into new markets will revitalize local economies and lift whole communities out of poverty and hunger for the long term.
Barry Mattson is the CEO of Rise Against Hunger.