By Ricky Dollison, Lead Farmer, Farm Team Program, Farm Journal Foundation

As a farmer who once served in the Georgia National Guard, I see a lot of reasons why it benefits the United States to continue to invest in helping smallholder farmers obtain new training and resources that would improve the productivity and income-generating capacity of their farms. One of the greatest sorrows of our time is that more than half of the estimated 795 million food-insecure people around the world are farmers and their family members, who grow food themselves but can't produce enough to keep their families well-fed on a year-round basis. This paradox breaks my heart, and is one of the reasons I joined the Farm Journal Foundation's Farm Team Program last year. Many of my neighbors in Southeast Georgia face similar problems, and I wanted to learn more about what is going on in agriculture so I can learn how to help them as well.

I joined the Georgia National Guard in 1980, and was trained as a radar technician. During my six years of service in the Guard, I never deployed overseas, because the U.S. military was not involved in active combat during that period. However, I know that in many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the cities and towns are teeming with poor people, many of them forced to stand every day along the road, hoping for a chance for a day's worth of work somewhere, to earn enough to feed their family for a few days at least. In the cities in developing countries, we know a lot of the poorest people are recent arrivals from the countryside, because their farms were too small or their resources too meager to make a decent living. In fact, cities are growing so fast that by 2050, four of the world's ten largest cities will be in Africa.

The desperation that arises from the inability to feed one's family leaves an individual with few choices, many of them bad. The options include migrating to cities in search of work, or even abroad, but also engaging in questionable or even illegal activity, such as black market transactions, theft, or prostitution.  At the far end of the spectrum, some end up resorting to armed violence, either full-time enlistment in a militia or insurgency, or cooperating with such groups to earn an occasional payment. During the Shia uprising in Iraq after the Second Gulf War, Newsweek reported that village residents were paid between $40-$100 to plant IED's on roads, intended to maim or kill American soldiers or Marines. In 2002, right before that war, the average monthly income for an Iraqi was less than $65 a month.

When you multiply this limited array of mostly bad choices by thousands or even millions of poor people in some countries, you often get political instability and government dysfunction, which sometimes degrades into open civil conflict and mass migration. Research from the World Bank has shown that a country facing widespread poverty and hunger faces a higher probability in any given year of seeing internal conflict erupt, either in the form of civil war or military coup. Providing development assistance to help farmers grow enough food to feed their families and boost incomes can help to stabilize rural communities, and prevent such conflicts. Such actions can be a cost-effective alternative to military intervention or letting the conflict fester. In addition, while many of those who engage in international terrorism are not poor and hungry, such groups often justify their actions and recruitment with rhetoric based on combating gross inequality, poverty, and food insecurity in their nations. Such groups often thrive in failed or dysfunctional states, such as the insurgent Houthi tribe that sparked the current civil war in Yemen or Al Shabaab, which continues to hold large swathes of territory in Somalia.

Much of the land that I farm in Tift County, Georgia has belonged to my family for generations. However, I have been a full-time farmer only since 1993, after my father died. Over the last few years, I have set out to change the way I farm, in order to generate a decent income out of a relatively small farm. Today, rather than raising only row crops such as corn and soybeans, I am growing squash and okra for fresh market sales to a regional grocery chain in the Southeast, Publix Super Markets. If we can invest in these countries to help farmers become better at farming, like I have become, we'll be spending far less money years from now on humanitarian response, military assistance, and even U.S. troops.  

In this urgent need to address food security, it is truly a matter of pay now, or pay a lot more later.