International
Food security
Hungry No More in Africa
Beyond being a season for being merry, this is also traditionally a season for giving. As we wind down the year, we at ONE in Africa are asking you to give a thought to the 13.3 million people in the Horn of Africa, who still face extreme hunger. If this thought leaves you unsettled, you’re exactly the person who should join ONE in Africa today together with our partners, the National Alliance Against Hunger and Malnutrition in Nigeria and the Agricultural Non State Actors Forum in Tanzania, as we launch our Hungry No More campaign in Africa.
This campaign will be focused on challenging African leaders to demonstrate their resolve in tackling famine and other agriculture related problems on the continent by:
- Calling on African leaders to fulfill the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture, which called for 10% of budgets to be allocated to Agriculture and Rural Development
- Target investments in small-holder farmers (especially women) and encourage sustainable private resources for agricultural development
- A call for African Leaders to be transparent and accountable on progress to achieve the Maputo Declaration
As part of the campaign we have also launched a video featuring a host of African stars including Didier Drogba, Nameless, Habida Malooney, John Allan Namu, Sauti Sol, Camagwini, Tumisho Masha, Dady Owen, Omotola Jalade and Sipho Mabuse. With their help we aim to focus the world’s attention once again this critical issue.
Farming is vital to African economies, where 70 % of the population derives its livelihood from the soil. At the same time, agriculture development is crucial to poverty reduction, where food security is tied to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and especially MDG-1, which is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. This campaign intends to elevate this issue on the global political and public agendas because there is a powerful connection between the Horn of Africa crisis and agriculture, and it is a shame that we still debate famine in the 21st century. We also need to help ensure African governments keep the promises they have made so that we can break the cycle of famine on the continent.
While the food crisis in the Horn of Africa tragically illustrates the impacts of drought and conflict, it also brings to the fore the effects of neglecting agriculture and local food systems. Reports of an emerging food crisis in the Sahel region highlight just how important this issue is.
Got to one.org/africa, sign the petition, and let’s put an end to famine.
How your support made a difference at the G20
Last week, I was in Cannes at the G20 summit. As you know, media coverage of the meeting was full of the eurozone and Greece, and you might be forgiven for thinking that’s all they discussed. But behind the headlines, something else really important happened. G20 leaders heard your voice, and the voices of more than 400,000 others who backed our Hungry No More campaign.
What’s more, they committed themselves to a number of the short and long-term agricultural solutions we’ve been pushing for to break the cycle of famine. With over 13 million people still in crisis in the Horn of Africa, I wanted to let you know what the G20 have pledged, how you helped achieve this, and what we need to do next.
In their final declaration, the G20 agreed that there is an urgent need to strengthen emergency and long-term responses to food insecurity and that responsible investment in long-term agricultural solutions in the poorest countries is “essential to promote food security and foster sustainable economic growth,” especially when focused on smallholder farmers.
They also pledged to reduce the dangerous impacts of food price volatility and improve the transparency of agricultural commodity markets. That could make a world of difference. Some of the poorest families have to spend as much as 80% of their household budgets on food, so sudden price rises mean real hardship.
More good news is that President Calderon of Mexico – the next Chair of the G20 – announced in Cannes that food security will be one of the G20’s major priorities in 2012. The G20 has made a good start on a framework to fight poverty through agriculture, and now is the time for countries to step up and turn it into reality.
As a ONE member, you are one of our strongest advocates, and we owe you a big thank you. This campaign was just 30 days long, and here’s a snapshot of what you helped achieve globally:
- 409,000 people signed our petition urging G20 leaders to act, and more than 700,000 viewed our ‘F-word’ TV ad on YouTube
- In just one week in the UK, nearly 500 members searched for their Member of Parliament using our new toolkit, leading to a burst of tweets, personalised emails and meetings with MPs. A few members also represented ONE at Downing Street, and handed in our petition
- ONE members in France joined our Paris team to project our campaign videos and a list of petition signers’ names onto the face of the historic Hôtel de Ville
- In Germany, members’ tweets provoked a response from a Government spokesperson assuring that they considered agriculture, food prices and food security important at the G20
- ONE members in the US handed in our petition on Capitol Hill, taking our message right to the heart of the US government.
But this isn’t the end of our Hungry No More campaign. Although we saw progress, the G20 still have a long way to go to make sure these promises are more than just warm words. We didn’t hear enough urgency or commitment to implementation, and the focus could too easily move away from this crucial issue.
Our job is to stop that from happening, and keep up the pressure. So when the smaller G8 meet in Chicago next year, and when the G20 gather again in Mexico, we will need your support to push for concrete results that make world leaders accountable to their commitments.
We’ll be in touch to let you know how you can help, but for now I simply wanted to say: thank you.
Together as ONE, we are making a difference.
PS. If you haven’t seen our Tigray: Then and Now documentary, then please do take a look and share. This is what your support is helping work towards.
Protecting crops to keep West Africans Hungry No More
Cowpeas (known as black-eyed peas) are an important nutrient-rich source of food in many parts of West and Central Africa. But each year, up to 50 percent of cowpeas in Africa are lost after harvest because of infestations by small insects such as weevils. Now, a simple technology is reversing this trend – the triple bagging method introduced by the Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage (PICS) project.
The project, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Purdue University, has been introducing the triple bagging method to farming communities across West and Central Africa since 2007. The technology is incredibly simple but undeniably effective – the three bags are triple tied and sealed airtight, creating an inhospitable environment for pests and keeping the crops safe. They can be stored anywhere for up to a year, allowing farmers to choose when they want to sell their crops.
Harvest time prices for cowpeas are US$20 to 25 per kg. However, with the new technology, farmers don’t have to worry about post-harvest loss and can wait as long as they want to sell crops. If they wait three to four months, prices can potentially increase up to US$100 per kg, potentially quadruplinga farmer’s income.
The cowpeas are also much safer. Farmers often use harmful pesticides to fight the weevils. One farmer in Ghana, who provides meals for a local school, testified that pesticides in her food were making some students sick. She now uses PICS bags, which have significantly improved her business and allowed her to provide healthy food to the students.
Communities are learning about the triple sack technology through public demonstrations in local villages. Demand for the bags is increasing as farmers familiar with the technology recognize that the bag is a smart investment.
To ensure sustainability of the programme, the PICS project has also prioritised supply chain development. This means that the bags are created by local manufacturers, bought by local distributors and sold to local vendors, who then sell to the farmers. PICS supports the vendors primarily through media and advertisements so that the local farmers know where to purchase the bags.
Cows help farming families in Malawi become Hungry No More
Many small farmers face challenges to earn enough money to feed their families and send their kids to school. A single dairy cow can raise a farmer’s annual income up to six times above the national average of only US$250, thereby lifting their families out of extreme poverty. Collectively, a developed dairy sector also helps reduce dependency on imports, thus making buying dairy products less expensive.
Donata Kuchawo is a 45 year-old married mother of five and caretaker of two orphans who turned to dairy farming because growing maize and beans alone was not enough to provide for her family. After turning to the Chitsanzo Milk Bulking Group,a dairy cooperative in rural Malawi supported by Land O’Lakes, General Mills and USAID, Donata has been able to pay for her kids to go to school, support her sister’s children and builda home.
In 2007, Land O’Lakes started working with farmers in Malawi, providing an initial investment of milking cows and a cooling tank. They introduced the unique concept of requiring farmers to give the first female calf born to another farmer as a form of loan repayment for the initial cow. Donata was one of these recipients. Her cow, named Zowari, produces about 30 litres of milk each day, of which four litres are used for home consumption while the remaining 26 litres are sold through the milk bulking group.
Every day, members of the Chitsanzo Milk Bulking Group deliver 30-40 litres of fresh raw milk per day by bicycle, then test and place it in large cooling tanks.The milk is stored in the tanks and picked up about every other day by Lilongwe Dairies Limited, which purchases the milk and processes it in Lilongwe, the country’s capital.
The Chitsanzo Milk Bulking Group has more than 260 members, of which 150 are women. The group not only helps farmers to access improved cattle feed, veterinary care and financial services such as cattle insurance and mobile phone banking, but alsodonates a portion of its milk to local child care centres and orphanages. The group additionally provides an important nutrition support system for small farmers and their families, as well as serves as an entry point for HIV prevention education.
Donata is such an inspiration and proof that when you give women farmers a few tools, entire families and communities benefit. She employs five people to help run the dairy business as well as tend to crops. Donata is also saving up for another cow. Her heifer is currently pregnant and she hopes it will give birth to a female calf. If it is a girl, she will be passed onto the next family on the waiting list.
To imagine that one cow could make such a transformative difference in a family’s life might be hard, but it’s happening every day in rural Malawi.
Hungry No More: Mobile technology helps farmers in Ghana get a fair price
Getting a fair price at market is always a struggle.In many countries in Africa, there exists an antiquated trading system. A farmer sells his produce to individual buyers, who then crisscross the countryside on bicycles and sell the goods to processing plants in towns and cities and then pass them on to distributors, retailers and exporters. These individual buyers pay rock-bottom prices, making profits for themselves but leaving the farmers struggling to survive.
But a company called Esoko has found an innovative technology to change all that.
Prosper Biche is a yam farmer from eastern Ghana. For a small fee, Prosper has signed up to receive 10 price updates a week from Esoko,a private agricultural market information platform, helping him learn not only what his produce is worth but when is the best time to travel to market to sell it.
“Before Esoko, I sent my 100 tubers of yam to Accra and could get 20 Ghana cedis for it,” Prosper says. “Now I check prices on Esoko and go to Accra when prices are good. I can get up to 200 Ghana cedis for the same 100 tubers.”
For only US$1 per month, this service has a tremendous return on investment; Esoko reports that farmers are now paid 20 to 40 percent more for their crops, a significant increase to their income and family’s quality of life.
Esoko uses researchers to obtain data for most of the agricultural markets it covers, but hopes in the future to have users directly supply most of the information to the system. The product is expanding to include information on stocks, the weather and buyer locations, as well as helping to coordinate transport and supply chain infrastructure. Currently, it is being used in nine African countries, including Nigeria and Malawi.
Hungry No More: Getting more rice from less resource in Mali
Moussa is a farmer in the arid region of central Mali. He and his family use a simple set of smart farming practices and principles that allows farmers to get “more from less.”
Pioneered in Madagascar in the 1980s, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) is proving that poor smallholder farmers can increase yields and at the same time reduce costs by simply changing the way they grow rice. The system is being adopted in other African nations with impressive results.
“We used to grow rice on all our land. Now, we grow the same amount of rice on half of our land and vegetables on the other half,” says “Now that farming is profitable for us, my family and I can all stay in our village and the children go to school. Before SRI, we couldn’t even think about school for them.”
SRI is a methodology for increasing the productivity of irrigated rice by changing the management of plants, soil and water. In dry places like Mali, farmers plant fewer seeds and use less land and water than they would if they were flooding their fields and using lots of synthetic fertilizers. This translates into lower expenses and higher incomes.
Moussa’s fellow farmers from Douékiré
Moussa swears by the SRI system: “Today, it takes a lot less money to grow rice.Before, we used five times as many seeds, eight times as much fertilizer, twice the water and three times as much gas to pump the water. Now, we do not have to spend as much to grow our rice.”
Before SRI was introduced in the village, women would sit in flooded fields for days, transplanting and weeding. Many would get sick with fever or diarrhea from sitting in the water. Now, because the fields are no longer flooded, men do most of the weeding with a weeder, giving more time for the women to tend to their vegetable gardens, an important food source in an area often plagued by malnutrition.
Moussa, together with other farmers in his village, tried out the SRI method at the suggestion of NGO Africare. On a tiny test plot, they saw how well SRI worked and started growing rice in their individual fields. Now, other villages want to know how they do it. Moussa is currently president of the Federation of the Unions of the Cooperatives of Goundam District in Mali and has International advocate for SRI.
The F Word: why we did it
ONE’s new campaign ad is getting a lot of attention. Not all of it of the admiring kind. Yahoo’s news pages brand it the “shocking F-word vid”. In the UK, the folk who decide what is fit and proper content for TV ads are stewing over it. A decision is expected shortly (watch this space). Critics say we’re just trying to shock.
There’s an irony here. A few weeks ago I was watching a news report on the spreading famine in Somalia. Families were walking seventy or eighty miles to cross the border to the relative safety of the Dadaab camp in Kenya. Some mothers arrived speaking of the horrific choice they’d had to make: which of their children to leave behind? Knowing that not all would make it, they’d had to make the most appalling decision. The weakest children left to die on the side of the long road to Dadaab.
If this does not shock us, we are beyond shock. We are unshockable.
A day or two after seeing that report, and after hearing from former colleagues in Save the Children and Oxfam that it really was as bad as this, we were talking in the ONE office about what we could do. The thought emerged: isn’t ‘Famine’ the real F-word? We all understand famine as a biblical notion, like plague and pestilence. We all get it as a historical abhorrence, like slavery and apartheid. But famine in the present tense? Famine in the 21st century? Isn’t that just obscene?
And so the idea was born. It wasn’t a hard sell to get people to help us. The acclaimed director Jesse Dylan came on board. A cast of characters, many of whom have a first-hand understanding of Africa, like K’Naan, Annie Lennox, George Clooney and Bono, offered to help. Our brilliant ONE creative team, led by Roxane Philson and Jeff Davidoff, pulled it all together at lightning speed. And now you see it. The results of our efforts.
It isn’t meant to shock. We hope it makes people stop and think. Think about the fact that this situation is not some act of God or nature. Drought may be inevitable but famine is not. I was in the remote highlands of Ethiopia not long ago – the kind of place that you might expect to struggle most. But not now. With long-term investments in agriculture, early warning systems, food reserves, irrigation and more, those rural communities are getting by. It’s fragile, for sure. But they are weathering this storm.
The same is true across the region. Much of Africa – even where the food system is under serious stress – is managing to sidestep the worst of this crisis. Most of Africa is hungry no more. Parents are seeing their children grow up hungry no more. One child, one family, one village at a time. Hungry No More.
And yet, as today’s latest UN situation report is expected to confirm, 750,000 people are threatened with death in the next six months. These are the people who couldn’t step to the side. They are caught in the full force of a silent storm. Many of those lives can still be saved, if the world acts urgently and boldly. And beyond this crisis, let’s determine now that we will never let this happen again. Nobody’s saying it’s easy. But it can be done.
Children left to die on the side of the road. F*****. Let’s stop it.
See the ad and sign ONE’s petition
This article first appeared on the The Huffington Post
Drylands: Sustaining Life on Earth
Ahead of an important UN Meeting next week on desertification, Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), explains why the issue is so important.
Imagine you’re holding a one minute sand timer. Turn it over, and let the sand flow.
Consider that, in the single minute it takes for the sand to fall, 23 hectares of land will be lost to drought and desertification. That’s approximately 20 football pitches, per minute.
Over the course of a year, that equates to 24 billion tons of fertile soil, the most significant, non-renewable natural resource we have. That’s 24 billion tons, per year.
While the remaining sand piles up, consider the global impact this loss of fertile land has on water and food security. Over the next 25 years land degradation could reduce global food productivity by as much as 12%, leading to a 30% increase in world food prices.
We’ve all seen the impact of rising food prices in the cost of our supermarket shopping baskets. But if you are in the bottom billion of the world’s poor, of course, this is more than an economic annoyance at the checkout. As a poor farmer in the Horn of Africa, you watch as your crops wither from lack of rain, your once productive land turns to dust and your family goes hungry.
Thankfully, there is a solution. We need to stop working against the natural environment and do something positive to mainstream sustainable land management techniques into global policy and local practice. In delivering food and water security, these techniques will help us take genuine steps towards combating global poverty.
The United Nations General Assembly will meet on 20 September in New York. Preparations to discuss desertification, land degradation and drought in the context of poverty eradication and sustainable development, are thankfully gathering pace. We can all see the importance of a unified emergency response when drought and famine strike – the situation in the Horn of Africa is testament to that. Leaders also need to take bold steps to ensure the best land management techniques are adopted for global food security, poverty reduction and environmentally sustainable growth.
Now is the time for leaders to commit and deliver. In choosing to protect land against further degradation, they will build community resilience against the crippling effects of drought and famine.
The side-effects of failing to act decisively with sustainable solutions are increasingly horrifying. Mass hunger, social tension, unemployment, migration, political instability and armed conflict will rise in countries where land is under pressure. We all need to embrace a strategy around prevention that secures the health and productivity of land for the well-being of present and future generations.
In reality, eradicating hunger will take longer than one minute. Sustainable Land Management techniques require a period of time before the benefits are felt. That’s why we need to start now. With the help of ONE supporters, we can ensure these techniques are mainstreamed into global policy and local practice.
Luc Gnacadja
Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
About UNCCD
Established in 1994, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development issues to the land agenda. It focuses on drylands, which cover 41% of the Earth and are in habited by over 2 billion people. Drylands account for 44% of the world’s cultivated ecosystems and have provided 30% of all the world’s cultivated plants. However, 8 of the world’s 25 biodiversity ‘hotspots’ are in the drylands and up to one fifth of the drylands have been steadily degraded since the 1980s. The Convention’s 194 Parties are dedicated to improving the living conditions of the world’s poorest 1.2 billion resident in the drylands, to maintaining and restoring the land’s productivity, and to mitigating the effects of drought.
Maputo Declaration on Agriculture holds Key to ending Famine in Africa
As I write, the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa continues to worsen. Figures from the UN’s Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) show that the number of people affected by food shortages in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti has escalated from 10 million to 12.4 million. About 2.3 million of the region’s children are acutely malnourished and the UN Children’s Fund says more than half a million of them are at risk of death without urgent intervention. The United Nations has described the situation as the worst drought the region has seen in 60 years. As dreadful as this situation already is, the fear is that the worst is yet to come. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network forecasts worsening drought conditions for the coming months, particularly in northern Kenya, which has 3.2 million people who are “food insecure”.
As a mother, my stomach churns when I hear stories of mothers having to choose between which children to drag along with them to refugee camps and which ones they leave behind to die. But this is the reality that many mothers affected by the famine are faced with. And these are the cold facts that face African Heads of State ahead of a conference to raise funds to support the humanitarian relief work convened by the African Union at its headquarters tomorrow.
As the esteemed leaders of our great continent make their way to Addis, I am earnestly hoping and praying that they will seize this opportunity to further demonstrate their commitment to forging African solutions to African problems such as the crisis that faces their fellow Africans at this time of great need. We at ONE can already acknowledge the ways in which African leaders and their citizens have responded to the crisis so far. When an 11 year old Ghanaian schoolboy determined to help children facing starvation in Somalia raises more than $500 in a single week I know there is hope. Then there is the ‘Kenyans for Kenyans’ initiative, where ordinary citizens, contributing as little as 10 Kenyan shillings, pulled together a total of about $4m, and we’re still counting. The Gift of Givers, all the way from South Africa, loaded 500 tons of food to distribute to the hardest hit in Somalia. The governments of Sudan, Namibia and South Africa are amongst those that have responded to the call by the UN for funding. The Kenyan government has generously opened its borders to Somali refugees, arriving daily on its borders by the thousands, even when it’s beyond government’s capacity to manage the crisis. The African Union’s peacekeeping force, AMISOM, is treating an outbreak of measles and other diseases such as malaria and diarrhea in a camp for people displaced from their homes, while the AU Mission is securing both the seaport and the airport in Somalia, thus making it possible to bring in the much-needed humanitarian supplies. These stories attest to the generous spirit of us as African people and we at ONE are proud of the African engagement. However, there remains a lot more work to be done. The Horn of Africa drought appeal is only 46 per cent funded, requiring an additional US$1.4billion. As an African citizen nothing would make me more proud than to see all of our African leaders stepping up even more to help our fellow Africans in the Horn of Africa. Help is needed urgently and desperately.
Next to this immediate and short term agenda item at the AU Heads of State meeting today, should be the closely linked but more medium to long term agenda of accelerating the meeting of their commitments under the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security to spend 10 percent of national budgets on agriculture development. In this declaration made during the Second Ordinary Assembly of the African Union in July 2003 in Maputo, African Heads of State and Government reaffirmed the need for ownership of their own development agenda and agreed to achieve 10 percent within five years. However as of the 2008 deadline, only seven countries are currently meeting the 10 percent agriculture spending target. These countries are Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Malawi, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. A number of other countries are making reasonable progress in the right direction. The question we have to answer is not if another season of drought will recur on the continent. Our experts tell us, it will. The question is rather, how ready is Africa to deal with the next drought season? With the knowledge that we have, the next drought need not be another humanitarian catastrophe of people dying and being displaced due to hunger. In other words, we need not wait for the next pledging conference to address a predictable recurring problem. The Maputo declaration gives us as Africans a fair shot at ending famine on the continent once and for all, in the long run.
Our last appeal for the AU agenda is a more definite plan to deal with the refugee crisis. An assessment by the World Food programme shows that the Dadaab refugee camp in north-eastern Kenya continues to receive large influxes of refugees mainly from Somalia. Kenya currently has about 447,000 refugees in Dadaab with 1,500 new arrivals every day. These are not refugees of war as we more often see, but rather they are refugees of famine as they have been described by the World Food Program. The Kenyan Government deserves commendation for its generosity in hosting these refugees and we thank them. We hope that plans to open Ifo 2 are on track as this would help ease the congestion at Dadaab. At the same time we call upon other African nations to consider opening up their borders to the hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees, looking for a place of shelter.
When all is said and done, and the Horn of Africa remains mired in the humanitarian tragedy of famine which deserves the spotlight of international media attention it is important to remember that it is but one part of the continent. Let us therefore be mindful not to bundle the whole continent into a hopeless single image of starvation and penury. Let us also remember that despite Africa’s development challenges while many world economies have suffered a backlash in the economic recession that followed the global financial crisis, Africa countries escaped relatively unscathed. According to the International Monetary Fund sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by an average 5.5 percent this year before accelerating to about 6 percent in 2012. Growth will be driven by low and middle income countries such as Ghana and Ethiopia with oil exporters such as Nigeria and Angola lending support. These are phenomenal stories that ought to be told.
Crisis in the Horn of Africa
You may have seen the pictures of starving people in the Horn of Africa on your TV screens. We are all asking: how can this be happening again? Parts of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are facing one of the worst droughts for 60 years, and around 10 million people are desperately in need of food, clean water and basic sanitation. But something can be done. You can add your voice to help make a difference.
Despite the urgency of the situation, most world leaders are responding too slowly. Immediate aid is essential. Yet at the same time we must not let them drop the ball on long term solutions as has too often happened in the past.
Dear World Leaders,
Please urgently provide the full funding that the UN has identified as necessary to help people in the Horn of Africa, and please keep your promises to deliver the long term solutions which could prevent crises like this happening again.
Some people look back to previous droughts and question whether things will ever change. But because of the smart aid that is supporting African leadership, progress really is being made. For example, 87% of people in the world today have enough food to eat and lead healthy lives – up from just 76% in 1970. And in Ethiopia the number of people malnourished has fallen from 71% in 1992 to 46% now.
But we know how to change things even more: we can help stop starvation now – and stop the causes of starvation. Firstly, we need to make sure funding is provided to pay for urgent help that will prevent people from dying. Secondly, the promises that world leaders made to invest in long term solutions must be kept, so that the people of this region can feed themselves and will not need food aid in the future.
Thanks for helping us to pressure our governments to save millions of lives – today and tomorrow.
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About the Blog
The International ONE Blog is a daily log of the anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by ONE staff, with guest contributions from ONE volunteers, members and allies.
The content of each post and each comment represents the views of that author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
TAGS: Africa, Agriculture, Food, Food security, Horn of Africa, Hungry No More