We can grow our way out of famine
In an OpEd piece in The National, a new English-language daily in Abu Dhabi, Chandra Madramootoo, Dean of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Â鶹AV writes that in the early 1960s, parts of the world, particularly Asia, were affected by back-to-back droughts that led to massive starvation, famine and deaths. ... So it is ironic that, 40 years later, in the midst of a global food crisis, the directors of IRRI and CIMMYT jointly wrote to the President of the World Bank about the significant erosion of support for agricultural research. Over the past 15 years, there has been a 50 per cent decrease in real terms of the CGIAR budget. Can history be repeating itself? A reinvestment in agricultural research in both the developed and developing countries is urgently needed if we are to achieve the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly with respect to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.