As the European Union launches its rescue plan for the Millennium Development Goals in Brussels today (Wednesday 21 April) a new report reveals how investing in smallholder and women farmers is the key to halving hunger (the first of those goals: MDG1).

There are an estimated 800 million smallholders cultivating 400 million farms of less than two hectares, and these farms support up to two billion people, or a third of humanity; and produce half the world’s food (rising to as much as 90 per cent in Africa). And most of these smallholders are women.

However ‘Fertile Ground’ shows that, in the countries studied in the report, Malawi, Kenya and Uganda, less than one per cent of the agriculture budget is targeted at women despite their central contribution to the production of food.

“One billion people going hungry must be a wake-up call that there’s something very wrong with our farming,” said Tennyson Williams, Acting Regional Director for West and Central Africa.

“This startling increase in hunger damages peoples’ development and is undermining progress on other Millennium Development Goals, especially child and maternal mortality,” said Nixon Otieno, ActionAid’s policy director in Kenya.

“Despite recent commitments, donor aid to agriculture is still too little, uncoordinated and arrives too late,” said Tennyson Williams. “It has also been poorly targeted and remains hugely inconsistent with the realities of women's role in food production.”

What the report tells us:

2.9 million Ugandans could be lifted out of poverty by 2015 if the country reached a six per cent agricultural growth rate annually.

In Kenya, 1.5 million lives could be improved, if current sums on agriculture doubled from 5 to 10 per cent.

In stark contrast, Malawi is one of Africa’s highest spenders on agriculture and as a result food security is better than at any time in recent history. In 2004, 1.5 million people needed food aid while in 2009, this number had dropped to 150,000 people.

ActionAid believes that by scaling up support to smallholders to at least $40 billion per year globally, world leaders can deliver a 50 percent reduction hunger and poverty by 2015 – the most fundamental of the UN Millennium Goals.

Furthermore, the most sustainable way to stop hunger is to increase total farm productivity in situ – in the field – where poor and hungry people live and work and are in most need of greater food supplies.

• Download the report ‘Fertile Ground: How governments and donors can halve hunger by supporting small farmers’
• Find out more about Sustainable Agriculture