Farming is Back

Published November 03, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

As I mentioned, Bill Gates is investing in farmers around the world, aiming to empower them after decades of neglect from domestic policies and measly international aid. Some assert that he's going about it all wrong, but the fact remains: the spotlight is focused on farmers.

Apparently, according to an article in Time Magazine, Gates is at the head of a new trend: the international community and national governments are again focusing on supporting agriculture. The article's author, Michael Shuman, describes how farmers came to be so ignored:

Governments equated economic progress with steel mills and shoe factories. While urban centers thrived and city dwellers got rich, hundreds of millions of farmers remained mired in poverty. Agriculture in many developing nations stagnated.

"Now," he writes, "the farm is back."

WIth the possibility of food shortages looming and the sour economy putting on the pressure, world economic policy has suddenly taken a shine to agriculture in what Shuman calls "a renewed global quest for food security and rural development."

While the international community is looking at agriculture at a meta-level, a lot of young people in the US are discovering an interest in the day-to-day life of farming.

While it might irk some that a major to-do is being made of a few back-to-the-Earthers going ga-ga with agrarian nostalgia when our country's dyed-in-the-wool farmers have been toiling away unthanked all this time, there is something to be said for the fact that increased societal interest in the ins and outs of where our food comes from will help the US in many ways.

Farms do, after all, create the food we depend on to survive, and the more the truth of that penetrates to various sectors of society, the better.

Photo courtesy of newagecrap on flickr

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Author

Katherine Gustafson is a freelance writer and editor with a background in international nonprofit organizations. Her articles, essays, and stories have been published in numerous magazines, newspapers, books, and Websites.