Global Food for Thought

Roger Thurow - Outrage and Inspire - A Mother's Day Parable From Uganda

By Roger Thurow

A mother knows.

“This child is brilliant,” Harriet Okaka says about her one-year-old son, Abraham.  She isn’t bragging, just observing.  “I can tell, just by looking at him,” she says, “the way he plays, the way he is.”

Harriet, 33, is a smallholder farmer in the northern Uganda village of Okii, near the town of Lira.  Abraham is her sixth child.

“The other children started walking by the time they were two years old.  Abraham is walking at one,” she says.  The mother has noticed things.  When Abraham sees an animal, he motions for it to come, she notes.  When he hears music, he claps and dances.  “These are indications that his brain is developing well,” she says.

On a hot afternoon, Harriet and Abraham are sitting under a mango tree, savoring the shade with a dozen other women and their young children.  A mango falls from a branch and bounces in the middle of them.  Abraham is the first to react, quickly crawling a couple of feet to grab the fruit.  Abraham takes a bite.  All the adults laugh.  Harriet beams.

“You see,” she says.

It is no mere coincidence, Harriet believes, that Abraham was born on the day in April 2012 when she and other women farmers had completed their first training session in the art of planting orange-flesh sweet potatoes and a new variety of beans.  They are crops rich in micronutrients essential for the health of women and their children: Vitamin A in the sweet potatoes and iron in the beans.  The crops – particularly beneficial during the 1,000 Days period between when a woman becomes pregnant and the second birthday of the child -- were developed by an organization called HarvestPlus, pioneers in biofortifying staple foods with higher levels of micronutrients, and deployed by the humanitarian agency, World Vision.

Commentary - Failing to Address the Complexity of US International Food Aid Policy May Result in Perpetuating the Problem of World Hunger

By Hannah Laufer-Rottman

Hannah Laufer-Rottman is Executive Director of Palms for Life Fund, a not for profit that promotes a global alliance to end poverty and hunger. 

An encouraging new development from the Obama Administration intends to change the way the US distributes its international food aid. But will it succeed? While the goal of reducing hunger in the world continues to be a key strategic goal of this country, the effectiveness of the policy will hinge on the application of a global, regional and country-by-country understanding of how complexities can work for or against the issue.

The key elements of the policy will have to address these complexities: 1.) the hijacking of the right to food for all under an elaborate system of charity, 2.) the “weapon” element of food between nations, 3.) the necessity to distinguish between emergency and non-emergency food aid, 4.) the need to have a global, regional, and country-by-country comprehensive approach for determining  how to allocate US-grown food, local food or some combination of the two, 5.) the role of land investment in Africa as an impediment to local farming solutions, and 6.) the need to address the environmental and sustainable elements of food production.

Photo of the Week

The Karimi group of Tabalab, Kenya, receives top dress fertilizer, solar lights, maize bags, sukuma seeds, and cassava cuttings at top dress delivery in Teso. Photo courtesy of the One Acre Fund blog.

Roger Thurow's Moment of Great Disruption

Roger Thurow, senior fellow with the Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative, gave a TEDxChange talk in Seattle on April 3.  He recounts his experiences in Ethiopia during the famine and explains why the international community needs to invest in smallholder farmers.

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

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Photo of the Week

Joska Aweko (left) is working with TechnoServe junior business advisor Jane Akot to improve her farming techniques and increase the income she earns from cotton. A mother of eight, Joska was among the first to return to her village in northern Uganda after a destructive civil war had forced her family to flee their home and live in government-run camps under harsh conditions. Photo Credit: TechnoServe

Photo of the Week

Marion Odongo of Ringa, Kenya, uses a knife to crack kernels of maize loose from a dried cob so she can store them to last her through the year. Credit: Hailey Tucker

Photo courtesy of the One Acre Fund blog. One Acre Fund is an NGO in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi that helps 137,000 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

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification: A Practical Solution for the Global Development Agenda

By Sir Gordon Conway
Professor of International Development, Agriculture for Impact, Imperial College London
This originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Hunger, malnutrition, poverty, climate change, environmental degradation - addressing these injustices is at the forefront of political meetings the world over. Yet these problems persist as global leaders strive to find efficient and synergistic ways of tackling them sustainably.

In Africa alone over 200 million people are chronically hungry and 40% of children under the age of 5 are stunted. At the same time, the African population is still rapidly growing and experiencing serious declines in its agricultural resource base with present food production systems only expected to be able to meet 13% of the continent's food needs by 2050.

Meeting the challenge of this "post-2015" development agenda - so-called because it will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) once they expire in 2015 - requires new solutions to addressing food insecurity, resource scarcity and at-risk rural livelihoods.

One such solution is Sustainable Intensification.

Sustainable Intensification as a new development paradigm

The phrase "Sustainable Intensification" was originally coined as a technical term, but it has become highly politicised more recently by various groups and is often incorrectly associated only with high-input, industrial agriculture.

However, a new report Sustainable Intensification: A New Paradigm for African Agriculture, authored by the Montpellier Panel of which I chair, aims to revisit the original intent of Sustainable Intensification and explain how it can be used by many types of farms, even smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.

First coined by Jules Pretty and brought to prominence in a 2009 Royal Society Report and more recently in the FAO's Save and Grow Report, Sustainable Intensification can be simply defined as "producing more outputs with more efficient use of all inputs - on a durable basis - while reducing environmental damage and building resilience, natural capital and the flow of environmental services."