Recently, I was on a road in the Southern Choma District of Zambia to meet with Rosemary Pisani, a smallholder farmer and mother of eight who struggled to feed her children prior to joining a farmer's co-operative to raise goats. Thanks to the co-operative and support from other farmers, she now has a thriving business and all of her children are in school. On the way to meet with her, I passed women walking through the mud to the market with large loads of fruit and vegetables stacked on their heads. I thought how I might be on my way to seeing a different rural community if the road we were on was paved and well maintained. Often times in Africa, the few paved roads that do exist are littered with potholes and lead to unpaved ones nearly impossible to navigate without a proper vehicle. Closer to farming communities, the roads disappear entirely. This leaves rural communities, which have the potential to feed the more than one billion hungry people, remote, cut off and isolated. In sub-Saharan Africa almost 70 per cent of all people living in rural areas live more than 30 minutes walk from the nearest maintained road. Coif Annan, chairperson of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), last year acknowledged this isolation saying: "the average African small holding farmer swims alone. She has no insurance against erratic weather patterns, gets no subsidies and has no access to credit. I say 'she' because the majority of small-scale farmers in Africa are women." And indeed, as half of the world's smallholders are women, who do the majority of the on-farm production, we must keep in mind the punishing task of walking long lengths to get their produce to market. At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) we believe that farming, irrespective of size or scale, must be seen as a business and smallholder farmers as small-scale business owners rather than poor people who need handouts. There is growing recognition that these smallholder farmers and their rural communities are a major part of the solution to food insecurity and poverty - but only if they have what they need to do their jobs. The last century saw a Green Revolution that had a tremendous impact on agricultural yields and on food production, and transformed the lives of millions of people. Much of this success was because of infrastructure that was already in place. India's road density at the start of its Green Revolution in the 1970s was 388 kilometres per 1,000 square kilometres. This compares with 39 kilometres per 1000 squared in Ethiopia today and 71 kilometres per 1000 squared in Senegal. New roads bring other essential resources to rural communities. For example, in Ethiopia, only 2 per cent of rural people have access to electricity and telephone communications is more or less absent. Researchers believe this is because only 17 per cent of rural communities in the country live within one mile of a paved road. As well as poor infrastructure, many small farmers in Africa have insufficient access to productive assets, such as land, water and new technologies. As a result, yields are generally too low to allow the millions of rural households to generate any marketable surpluses. And even if the smallholders were able to produce a surplus, the disconnection between production and downstream activities, such as processing and marketing, hampers the access of their produce to markets. The cause of these missing, but vital, resources lies in the shameful neglect of agriculture for the past two decades. Both developed and developing countries - caught up in rapid economic expansion and technological development - got distracted. They turned off the tap to agriculture, leaving small farmers to rely heavily on basic farming practices and on government and donor handouts. The tap must be turned back on to agriculture in order for small farmers to survive, and investments must be smart and look towards long-term development. In IFAD's experience, working to simply double the income of a smallholder farmer who scrapes by on less than a dollar a day is poverty management, because at two dollars a day, he or she still remains poor. But supporting that smallholder to launch a farming business, that could generate a 5 fold increase in income, that is poverty eradication. If smallholder farmers are to be given the opportunity to become viable businesses, it is fundamental that they are connected to the markets. Indeed, support for rural infrastructure is a crucial element in the value chain approach - including last-mile roads, electrification, postharvest facilities, support to rural institutions, such as associations and cooperatives, and access to land and irrigation facilities. But we must also not forget research and new technologies, which together with improved infrastructure can lead the way to food security. In Benin, IFAD has seen successful increase in harvest yields after introducing New Rice for Africa or NERICA, which allows farmers to cultivate two or three crops a year with much higher yields. If given these resources, the next Green Revolution could be right around the comer. IFAD aims to strengthen each link in the value chain, from the smallholder, through the local trade agents and agro-processing, to regional and national markets. In value terms, the total approval of IFAD funding in which value chains were either components or the primary instruments for poverty alleviation, increased from 1.8 per cent in 2005 to 50 per cent last year. But we cannot accomplish this alone. It is important that investment come from a genuine global partnership between developed and developing countries. Global economic co-operation is a two-way street and we must make sure that this co-operation responds to the profound changes taking place in agriculture and food markets, which are linked with the international economy as a whole. And we need to link these small food producers with the people that need their product through viable and maintained infrastructure. In addition, we need to provide them with research and technology to ensure they can grow the best quality produce, and storage capabilities so that they can sell at peak-market times. . If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, there is great power and potential for them not only to feed themselves and their own communities, but to contribute to wider food security beyond their borders. We just need to come together and put the pavement down so that farmers like the ones I saw in Zambia can more easily make their way on the road to food security. Written by Kanayo F. Nwanza President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (lFAD) Source: Daily Graphic