Originally posted by the Voice of America. Voice of America content is produced by the Voice of America, a United States federal government-sponsored entity, and is in the public domain. Women Farmers Can Play Big Role in Reducing World Hunger, says New Report Joe DeCapua 21 April 2010 Women farmers hold the âkeyâ to sharply reducing world hunger, according to a new report from the humanitarian organization ActionAid. The release of the report â Fertile Ground -- coincides with a European Union meeting Wednesday in Brussels to revive efforts to achieve the Millennium Developments Goals (MDGs). Itâs estimated there are about one-billion people who go hungry every day. A Millennium Development Goal is to reduce that number by half by 2015.  Food producers Peter OâDriscoll, executive director of ActionAid USA, says there are a number of reasons to invest in women farmers. âFirst and foremost, particularly in places like Africa where the hunger problem is most severe, women produce most of the food. In some countries 70, 80 even 90 percent of the food people consume is produced by women small farmers,â he says. However, he says these women lack the necessary tools and resources. âInvestment in agriculture, investment in land, credit and so forth are simply not available for women farmers. So, what weâre trying to insist is that itâs crucial not only that governments increase the level of spending and investment in agriculture, but that they target it towards women,â says OâDriscoll, adding, âIf you really want to address the problem of hunger, you have to invest in hungry people in helping them to grow their own food,â says OâDriscoll. Farmers go hungry, too The ActionAid USA head estimates there are 800-million smallholder farmers around the world, who produce most of the food consumed in their countries. Frederic Courbet/Panos Picures/ActionAid Regina Jackson, 35, is married with 6 kids in Simotwa village, West Pokot, Kenya. She part of ActionAid efforts to help smallholder farmers. âBut itâs also important to note that when we talk about a billion hungry people in the world, probably 60 percent of those are smallholder farmers and another 20 percent are landless rural workers. So, clearly, the folks who are growing the food are also those who are experiencing the most chronic hunger,â he says. In Africa, women make up the majority of these smallholder farmers. But OâDriscoll says men and women often produce food for different reasons. âMen, who have better access to credit and better access to extension services, tend to produce cash crops for market, whereas women actually grow the food that their families will be eating.â Investing OâDriscoll says itâs now generally accepted that it was a mistake to reduce investment in agriculture over the past 25 years or so. âThere was an idea that if we simply got the government out of agriculture, and allow the private sector to come in, weâd have a more efficient and effective food system. Unfortunately, the results are that number of hungry people has actually dramatically increased over that time,â he says. James Akena/ActionAid In Uganda, Victoria Ddundu, 46, a widow and mother of 5, walks with her children in a village in Palisa. Her family relies on the food she grows. Besides investing more money, the ActionAid official says it should also be more targeted. âWe should be targeting that aid on the kinds of inputs that are most useful to those women,â he says. This includes access to credit and agricultural extension services, which aim to improve the economic, environmental and social conditions of the farmers. âEven where extension services are available, they tend to focus on the richer farmers, who have access to markets. Theyâre not reaching the kind of women who are actually growing the food that people need to escape from hunger,â he says. Tiny farms Many women farmers grow food on small patches of land. But OâDriscoll says that land can be made more productive. âFor many years the conventional wisdom has been that these pieces of land are too small and too unproductive and, therefore, not worth farming at all,â he says.  That attitude contributed to a âdramatic exodus from rural areas to cities.â But things are changing. âThereâs a tremendous body of evidence that investment in sustainable agricultural techniques - in multi-cropping, diversified cropping, in agro-ecological composting and various other forms of low cost, low external input agriculture â can actually be extremely productive,â he says. 2015 Would investing in smallholder women farmers help achieve the Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger around the world by 2015.? OâDriscoll says, âI think as a global community we simply have to take that as an imperative. I think itâs probably now almostâ¦35 years that the international community has been promising to halve the number of hungry people,â he says. He says the question is not whether it can be done, but how the world commits to doing it. âAs this report makes pretty clear, there is a number of dimensions. One is we do need to see a dramatic increaseâ¦in public investment in agriculture. And that means not only from African countries or developing countries themselvesâ¦but I think itâs clearly important for the donor communityâ¦to step up their giving,â he says.  The EU meeting in Brussels aims to come up with a ârescueâ plan for the MDGs. .