In his blogpost “Harvest and Hunger”, senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs wrote:
Two years ago, Farmer Walubengo harvested only 6 bags of maize on his half-acre. Then he became a member of the One Acre Fund, which provides seeds and fertilizer on credit, and farming advice to go with it, to some 50,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. In one season, he more than doubled his maize yield.
Despite such successes, agriculture development has been so woefully neglected. And so, in the Kenyan breadbasket regions of the Rift Valley and Western provinces, farmers faced a seed shortage when planting season arrived in March. Farmers wanting to grow as much as possible were stymied by the underdevelopment of the country’s seed industry. Incredibly, many of them left fields fallow – at a time when drought and hunger were spreading in other parts of Kenya.
In 2009, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) was established by the G20 nations to pool resources in support of country-led programs to improve the productivity of smallholder farmers. So far, the fund has allocated nearly $500 million dollars to 12 countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. But it has exhausted its funding, and no new donations have replenished it. At the last round of allocations, GAFSP was unable to fund 15 countries for lack of money.
One of those was Kenya. Within months, emergency food aid was rushing into the country. (Full post)
Good article……
But also am wondering if there is a way donors can as well consider giving more tools to these people instead of investing in food donation…we have a saying which means that teaching some one to fish is better than just giving fish to eat because skills and tools are longer term.
Hi Mary,
Of course you are right…! That is part of what we are trying to do: show that investing in agriculture before a drought or flood turns into a famine, is much wiser and worthwhile “investing” (donors, governments, policy makers,) than dealing with the human (and $) cost of an aid relief operation.
Right now, the humanitarian community can’t but deal with a famine relief operation. But it needn’t have come this far…
Peter.