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If the developed world fails to invest more in African agriculture and rural infrastructure to benefit the poor and help them escape poverty, the world will become a much more dangerous place, Cornell economist Per Pinstrup-Andersen said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21.
Investment in productivity-increasing agricultural research, he said, is particularly important because at present agricultural science and investment generally benefit affluent farmers and consumers.
He pointed out that about one-fifth of the world's population lives in dire poverty, and the already very skewed gap between rich and poor keeps growing. Pinstrup-Andersen is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell, the 2001 World Food Prize Laureate and chair of the Science Council for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a consortium of 15 international research agricultural centers that focuses on setting priorities for international agricultural research.
Some 800 million people in the world don't have enough to eat, said Pinstrup-Andersen. The consequences of such destitution are malnutrition, environmental degradation and worldwide instability.
These circumstances, he warned, also leave millions of people with nothing to lose, making them ripe for turning to international terrorism in their frustration. These people need to be heard, he said. Much of his research is focused on developing policies to improve the global food system for the benefit of the nutritional status of low-income people.
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