Now they and thousands of others in the lowlands of western Kenya are able to get year-round work as farm laborers or earn money from their once-neglected rice paddies. The government's investment in a rundown irrigation project has revived a rural economy that was in the dumps for years.

The discernible change that a season's harvest of rice has brought to the western Kenyan town of Ahero also helps illustrate a message the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has trumpeted this year: Governments need to invest more in agriculture to reduce the number of people who need food aid - currently one in six people across the globe.

Heads of state and government from around the world will gather in Rome tomorrow at an FAO summit to explore new strategies. The summit's goal is to rally the world behind a change in aid policy, and to secure a pledge to spend more money to develop agriculture in poor countries.

Kenya's program could serve as a model for a radical change in aid policy - getting people to feed themselves.

"When they wake up, there is somewhere they can go and work," Abiero said of his neighbors Friday as he sat at the edge of the four-acre paddy he's had since 1968. "Before, they used to go to sleep hungry and did not know whether they will be able to get food the following day."

Ahero rice farmers have been able to sell their surplus to the U.N.'s World Food Program, Kenya's national food agency, and the National Cereals and Produce Board, among others.

Mugambi Gitonga, a senior official of Kenya's National Irrigation Board that revived the Ahero Irrigation Scheme, said there was a dramatic change in people's lifestyles.

For Ahero's carpenters, "the best selling items were coffins. People were dying of so many diseases," said Gitonga, the board's chief planning officer. "Now the best selling items are furniture. Ahero is thriving."

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which is hosting the three-day summit at its Rome headquarters, says the share of international aid allocated to agriculture has plummeted from around 19 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2006.

Only recently has this trend started to reverse, but in the meantime high food prices and the financial meltdown have pushed the number of hungry people this year to a record 1.02 billion people - nearly a sixth of the world's population.

Farmers in the developing world could feed themselves and their compatriots if only they had access to basic items like seeds, tools, irrigation systems, as well as training and infrastructure such as storage facilities and roads from fields to markets, FAO says.

But with food prices relatively low until the spike in 2007-08, government and private investors felt there was less need to put money into agriculture, said FAO economist Kostas Stamoulis.

Money was diverted instead to less complex and more attention-grabbing projects.

"Agriculture lost its glitter," Stamoulis said. "It's much more media-friendly to go cut a ribbon in a hospital or a school rather than mess around with agriculture research or water projects."