BAD SOIL, bad weather, bad government -- and no cash. That about sums up the state of farming through great swaths of the developing and wish-it-were-developing world.

The high-fertilizer, high-pesticide Green Revolution of a generation ago ended hunger in much of India and eastern Asia, but across Central Asia, a large part of Central America and most of sub-Saharan Africa, farm families are if anything in worse shape than they've ever been. More competition for increasingly marginal land, more severe droughts, more warfare, more corruption, more debilitating disease -- particularly AIDS -- all serve to thwart those who try to live off the land.

The First World's response to hunger in the 1960s was to push big projects: new strains of grain, cultivation on a large scale, the free use of chemicals. To an extent it worked, though many worry today about the environmental toll in places like the Punjab in India -- but in any case it is prohibitively expensive in the truly desperate parts of the world.

Now there is a new way of thinking taking hold within aid organizations, and it boils down to this: Do a lot of little things.

Workers with groups like Catholic Relief Services are fanning out, encouraging farmers to grow what they're comfortable with but maybe tweaking some of the techniques here and there. Put down a leguminous plant called macuna between the rows of corn, and it will help get nitrogen into the soil and serve as fodder for pigs as well. Dig a trench that will catch rain this year and become a compost heap next year. Plant a row of cashew trees -- they make a natural fire break.

Other groups, like the French organization ACTED, are actively pursuing microcredit plans in places like Tajikistan where cash is even scarcer than rain. Loans on the order of $10 help provide the seed that will enable a subsistence farmer to have enough leftover harvest to be able to go to market and sell it. That $10 circulates in a loan fund controlled by a local board -- maybe it goes toward a truckload of pistachios next time -- and after awhile there's something that looks like an economy.

In Africa, soil scientist Pedro Sanchez won the World Food Prize this summer for his work on low-tech methods to improve yield. Shrubs that fix nitrogen in the soil and can then be used for firewood, Mexican sunflowers at the edges of fields that are rich in nutrients and provide perfect compost, and rocks from nearby deposits that dissolve in the acidic soil and release phosphates -- all work together, cost nothing and have dramatically improved the chances for formerly destitute farmers.

This transformation is tremendously encouraging, but precarious. Afghanistan and Central Asia must rely on millions of dollars' worth of food aid, and famine is again threatening in Africa. Mr. Sanchez, a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has helped change the lives of 150,000 farm families in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. Now, with the help of Western governments and private donors, he needs to reach millions more.