In this post in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog, Rick Leach, president and CEO of World Food Program USA, examines the empowerment of small-scale farmers to become active participants in the global economy as a strategy to tackle world hunger. Leach provides examples of successful initiatives to “show how smart investments and collaborations can make a real difference in addressing hunger” and writes, “It’s a compelling idea because, ironically, most of the world’s hungry people are in fact small-scale farmers — primarily women who live and farm on plots of land less than one acre in size” (11/2).