Global Food for Thought

This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

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This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

Please click here;to view this week's edition of the Global Food for Thought news brief.

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Roger Thurow - Outrage and Inspire - Forward Ever

FORWARD EVER

Kimilili, Kenya

The young man from the farm was looking smart in an olive green suit, salmon tie and cufflinks.  His black shoes were a bit scuffed, but his English was polished.  “We are moving forward,” he said.  “Forward ever, backward never.”

When last I saw Gideon Wanyama, at Christmastime 2011, his high school education was wavering in the balance.  He had just finished his third year, but it had been a mighty struggle.  All year long, his family had sacrificed to scrape up enough money for his school fees.  His mother, Leonida, a smallholder farmer, sold their maize harvest, prolonging the family’s hunger season.  Still, that wasn’t enough; several times, the principal of the high school sent Gideon home to bring back more money to complete the tuition payment.  Leonida, prizing the education of her children above all else, sold off other assets.  Then, days before the final exams, Gideon was stricken with a bad case of pneumonia.  He recovered in time to take the tests and, as the year came to a close, he was back home on the farm awaiting the exam scores.  During the holiday he helped his mother and father improve their mud-and-sticks house by slinging a new layer of mud on the walls. 

I featured Gideon and his quest for an education in my new book, The Last Hunger Season, and often readers ask, “What has happened to Gideon?  Has he finished school?”

After a week of reporting in western Kenya, visiting the farmers in the book, I am happy to report that Gideon has indeed completed high school, likely near the top of his class.  He won’t know the precise final scores for another month or two, but he says, confidently and with a broad smile, “I passed, I’m sure of it.”  If those scores are good enough, he hopes to enroll later this year at a university in Kakamega, a larger town in the region, “and my education will continue,” he says.  He still harbors an ambition to study law, but he knows that could take eight more years of school, which would require a longer stretch of sacrifice by his family.  So he is focusing on an alternate course: environmental studies.

Commentary - On Day One: Ensuring Food Security

By Dan Glickman

Dan Glickman is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, based in Washington, DC and a cochair of The Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative. Mr. Glickman served as the U.S. secretary of agriculture from March 1995 until January 2001. This post originally appeared on Diplomatic Courier.

Dear Mr. President,

You have many pressing priorities on your plate as you enter into a second term, but one area where your leadership can continue to make a difference here at home and abroad is a focus on global food security. How to feed a hungry world in a sustainable manner is one of the most vexing problems we will have to face in the coming years, but not an insurmountable task.

Remarkable progress has already been made during your first term under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s watch with the Feed the Future initiative. This innovative program begins moving us away from a model of food aid, to one where we are actually providing education and assistance to farmers in the developing world to begin to provide for themselves.

This important work is not charity or good will, but rather an investment in our own future and our own national interests. The vulnerability that comes from poverty and starvation breed instability and unrest—classic symptoms that make impoverished areas of the world easy recruiting targets for Al Qaeda and others who wish to do us harm.

Take last year’s famine in the horn of Africa as an example. This strategic area of the world is ripe for instability. After the last major famine in 2002, the U.S. was part of an effort to invest in the Famine Early Warning System Network to begin addressing the root causes of famine before it has the opportunity to become a crisis. As a result, millions of people who would have been at risk of starvation were spared from unnecessary suffering in 2011.

Photo of the Week

One Acre Fund farmers in Chwele District, Kenya attend a training on how to plant millet. They are comparing the length of their fingers as they are told to plant their millet seeds as deep as the second knuckle on their index finger. Credit: Hailey Tucker

Photo courtesy of the One Acre Fund blog. One Acre Fund is an NGO in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi that helps 135,000 smallholder farmers grow their own way out of poverty by providing a "market bundle" that includes education, finance, seed and fertilizer, and market access.

This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

Please click here;to view this week's edition of the Global Food for Thought news brief.

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This Week's Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

Please click here;to view this week's edition of the Global Food for Thought news brief.

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