A farmer tells his child, “study well and get a job or you will suffer like me.” This is not an isolated caution from a hapless father, but a reality that plays out time and again across villages in the emerging world. Parents don’t want their children to farm. As governments across the world clamour to avoid urban unrest triggered by food prices which have been rising since 2008, farmers are increasingly being considered as mere suppliers of cheap food. Every government wants to increase food productivity, but for a successful transformation, policy-makers have to make farming a profitable profession.
Ironically, food producers are themselves suffering from hunger, poverty and malnutrition. Transforming the system is never easy. The focus should not just be on solving these problems, as they are actually consequences of a bigger issue that needs to be resolved: the fact that the majority of the world practices an unprofitable profession. This issue reminds me of the words of Albert Einstein, “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.” This is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces need to fit together. A lot of those pieces are not on the farm.
See full Article: http://forumblog.org/2013/10/make-farming-a-profitable-profession/
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