Millions Fed: Proven successes in agricultural development

Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people—more than 80 percent of the world’s population—have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world’s poorest countries.

This book examines how policies, programs, and investments in pro-poor agricultural development have helped to substantially reduce hunger across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The 20 success stories presented here include the international effort to breed wheat that is resistant to rusts, one of the oldest and most devastating threats facing that crop; China’s grand experiment with shifting from collective agriculture to individual household farming; West African farmers’ rediscovery of management practices for soil, water, crops, trees, and livestock in the arid Sahel; and Bangladesh’s homestead food-production initiative that encouraged people to grow and eat more nutritious foods. Such accomplishments provide both lessons and inspiration for continued efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition among the one billion people still facing this scourge.

The book includes a chapter on community forestry in Nepal "Seeing the Forest through the Trees" contributed by Hemant Ojha, Lauren Persha, and Ashwini Chhatre.