"Poor farmers farm poorly," Mike Mack, CEO of biotechnology company Syngenta, told HuffPost Live this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"Most of the farmers in the world, hundreds of millions of them, are smallholder growers, typically women, and they work desperately hard on their farms and they don't make very much money," he said. "Most of the world's poor are farmers, ironically," he added. Mack argued that people in cities need to understand this and the importance of raising up farmers' prosperity.
He also suggested that most farming around the world differs from the vision of large-scale farming that is common in the U.S. "The vast majority of farming is even a poorer version of … the American ideal about agriculture," he said. "It is very poor families typically ... an acre, and they do it by hand."
Watch the full interview above, and read more from Davos below: