Agriculture not en vogue...

I always knew agriculture was not en vogue, not at home (within the US) or abroad in development but I was floored by a figure I saw in the Christian Science Monitor "Relatively quick and substantial progress can be made if nations rededicate themselves to international aid for agriculture, which has dropped from 13 percent of all development aid in the early 1980s to only 3 percent now."... 3% of all development aid is for agriculture; folks, bottom line if people don't grow stuff then they don't eat. I knew that agriculture was not popular but 3% just boggles my mind for something so basic and critical as agriculture. In the US and Europe I see people quibbling over details of agriculture and the most environmentally appropriate (important no doubt) ways and most healthy foods but then I think about the farmers toiling away to grow enough wheat/rice for their families, producing not even 1/5th of what an American/European farmer can produce in the same area... and wheat/rice is about all these subsistence farmer families eat.

My knee jerk assumption is that since much of the developed world lives far away from agriculture so has little concept of it and given supermarkets has little appreciation for agriculture that coupled with political interests that are injected into all forms of development aid I guess its not hard to see how agriculture is marginalized but still...