Lutacho, Kenya
The women farmers at the foot of the Lugulu Hills paused from the preparation of their fields for the planting season and looked forward to the harvest.
What, I asked them, would they do with a bountiful yield of maize, if they are so blessed?
“I will sell my surplus and buy a great cow to give milk for my family,” answered Agnes.
“I will use it as food for my family and to pay for education,” said Esther.
Beatrice volunteered, “Feed my family, send them to school.”
“I want to pay school fees and have enough food for my family,” said Leonida.
These goals were identical to those articulated by dozens of other farmers in western Kenya I’ve spoken with over the past several weeks. The two most common, almost unanimous, goals I heard are ending family hunger and providing education for the children.
As the answers came rushing forward in those fields below Mount Elgon near the Kenya-Uganda border, I thought they sounded familiar. And they were. Think back to almost precisely two years ago, when Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address.
“To the people of poor nations,” he said, “we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow, to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.”
Nourish starved bodies. Feed hungry minds.
Feed my family. Pay school fees.
They are the same priorities, whether poetically expressed by the president of the most powerful nation or humbly offered by a poor smallholder farmer in Africa.
The link between these expressions of ambition and hope is Feed the Future, the presidential initiative to reverse the international neglect of agriculture development that has evolved from those 30 words on Inauguration Day. Feed the Future seeks to create the conditions for the world’s poor smallholder farmers, particularly in Africa, to be as productive as possible, to feed themselves and their communities and hopefully have surpluses to boost their incomes, which can mean better education for their children. Poor smallholder farmers just like Agnes and Esther and Beatrice and Leonida.
Nourish starved bodies. Feed hungry minds.
And not by handouts of free food or free custom-built schools or free donations of books. Listen to the farmers; they want to provide these things themselves for their families, by making their farming profitable. They want to feed their families themselves. They want to be able to afford the school fees for their children, for primary and secondary school and college.
It’s in their own words. Feed our families. Educate our children.
Are those goals any different from what any American citizen wants, be they farmer or factory worker or computer scientists or professor or journalist? Those are the basic elements of providing for your family, no matter who you are or where you live.
And yet, Feed the Future and other programs of the administration that seek to promote agriculture development are under threat by the budget cutters in Congress. Members of Congress and all those in the electorate who want to whack all foreign spending should listen to the poor farmers of the world who would benefit from increased spending on agriculture development. “Feed our families. Educate our children.”
Can there be better goals, nobler aspirations, of American foreign aid? And besides, there’s absolutely nothing foreign about those goals.
Kenya is in someways a prosperous country. It is a big ag exporter. So what is going on here. More aid in a different format. Without discussion and getting to the root cause, nothing will change.
Posted by: george clark | Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 06:40 PM