Last week’s World Agricultural Forum World Ag Congress attracted a great crop of journalists, both locally and internationally. Pictured here interviewing keynote speaker Paul Collier (left) are two leaders of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) – current president Mike Wilson with Farm Futures magazine and senior vice president Markus Rediger of Switzerland’s LID Agricultural Information Center.

Read Mike’s feature on Paul Collier here.

Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford University and author of a book on global poverty, “The Bottom Billion”. He contends that there are three major policy changes that can be made by nations that would alleviate hunger in the poorest countries. One is biofuels subsidies. “I’m not against biofuels, I’m against subsidies for biofuels,” Paul says.

Not sure I agree with him on that one, but I do agree with his second premise that the ban on genetically modified crops in Europe and Africa should be lifted. “Europe shot itself in the foot and in the process it shot Africa in the heart because Africa really needs to adapt to climatic deterioration and a rising population and genetic modification of crops is potentially a godsend,” said Collier.

The third policy mistake Collier notes is the over emphasis in Africa on “peasant farming” and the resistance to commercial agriculture. “This has tended to be imposed on African by the agenda of some NGOs and development agencies who have a romantic attachment to the vanished peasant lifestyle,” something he says is very self-serving, “trying to impose our fantasies on the poorest people on Earth.”

You can listen to my interview with Paul Collier here: waf-09-bottom-billion.mp3

Flickr Photo Album for World Ag Forum

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