Eighty percent of those living in rural areas are poor. As moderator Etharin Cousins stated at the outset: “Today some 100 million of the farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa farm less than 2 hectares of land. Then came the round-table and some irrefutable facts. “Too much US government investment in health, not enough in agriculture,” he replied, matter-of-factly. Impulsively, I asked Tom for his thoughts about current funding for African development. Since then, Riley has continued to visit Africa and connect with fellow ambassadors. An industrial engineer and entrepreneur, from 2004 to 2009 Thomas Riley also served as the United States Ambassador to Morocco, where he helped negotiate the first-ever free trade agreement between the United States and an African nation. Seated next to me at Stanford was a former college classmate. The conference featured four global leaders: 1) Agnes Kalibata, Rwanda’s former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources and current President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) 2) Kanayo Nwanze, Past President of the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development and winner of the 2016 Africa Food Prize 3) Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation and former Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and 4) Usha Barwale Zehr, Director and Chief Technology officer at Maharashtra, one of India’s largest multinational seed companies. In November 2017, a meeting at Stanford University provided a modern primer on rural poverty and agricultural development with a special focus on Africa. Will coming decades finally end this chronic cycle of want? And where does tropical medicine fit in the modern nexus of food, agriculture, and health? For many people in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian state that is profoundly food-insecure, the season is either “wet, dry, or hungry.” The same dismal prospect continues to haunt millions of farmers the world over.
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