A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. Tha

A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. That is how you get those less than two dollars a day figures. They simply aren't using money. The food they produce and eat is definitely worth two dollars. When you look at the economics of commercial farming, most of the cost is spent on inputs such as synthetic fertilizer and seeds. There was a hybrid rice company telling you, you can earn a whopping $1000 per unit of land, all you have to do is pay them $800 for the inputs. You still have to pay for the land and the equipment. The seed and fertilizer companies are earning most of the money. Meanwhile if you are a simple subsistence farmer you don't have a thousand dollars, so you will have to borrow the money and if your country isn't self sufficient agriculturally and bleeding money because of trade deficits then what is it exporting to buy the inputs? It is not like you are selling basic necessities to some high tech country that is better off doing something else. So you borrow money from foreign countries in a foreign currency, a currency that is much more stable than yours. This is hardly a business model that works for the poor. Whenever people talk about GMOs, they think the fundamental problem of agriculture is that there is an insufficient quantity of food, when the actual problem is that the economy needs to formalise and poor people need access to markets to buy or sell things.