Photo Gallery Feeding a Hungry World
World leaders are meeting in New York this week to discuss progress on the UN's Millennium Development Goals. The world's nations have failed miserably in addressing one of the main goals, the fight against hunger.
Researchers believe that small farmers, not large-scale farms, are the key to feeding the planet. This photo shows a farmer in Ethiopia plowing a field.
A market in Maradi, Niger: Along with the urban poor living in slums in the developing world's megacities, small farmers often suffer the most from poverty and deprivation, laboring all day without ever having enough to eat.
Food was scarce for the Kenyan farmer Dorca Mutua last summer. She watched as first her calf and then her cow died. "There was no more grass," the farmer says. What little she was able to coax from the ground was only enough to provide her family with one meager meal of corn porridge a day.
Hunger affected tens of thousands in northeastern Brazil in the 1990s. Many of those people are now strikingly small as a result. Amaro da Silva (front), who used to harvest sugarcane for a living, stands only 1.35 meters (4 feet and 5 inches) tall. Now he lives with his youngest son João (back) and receives a state retirement pension equivalent to the minimum wage, about 230. His improved situation is thanks to Brazilian President Lula's efforts to fight poverty, he says.
