In honor of world food day, I’m going to share a letter from Davis Omanyo, one of my coworkers. He lives in Uganda and oversees all of CRWRC’s work in East Africa. Sometimes it seems like the media always shares depressing stories when reporting about hunger; I wanted to share some positive things that are happening.
“How much are you going to harvest from this plot?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” answers the farmer, Ekitale. What automatically comes to my mind is a reflection of life in my village. Such thinking is an attempt to find an answer to the many questions that cross my mind whenever I visit a family or community that is not producing sufficient food. Among the questions that spring up: Why are these people hungry even though they have enough land? Why do these people not produce enough food to feed themselves? How can a farmer not know how much food he or she will produce?
These questions arise every day, and yet many NGOs and government-trained workers are busy each day addressing the issue of food insecurity in Africa. Africa is capable of producing enough food to provide for itself and to even export some to other developing nations. This farmer is caring for his crop in a semi-arid area, and with little knowledge he is able to produce food along the river bank in Turkana district. In my conversation with him, I found out that he didn’t know how much food he was going to produce, nor did he know how much food he needed to feed his family. This lack of knowledge is at least part of the explanation about the insufficient food production in poor communities in East Africa, and likely other developing countries as well.
Many families are not able to tell how much their land can produce and also do not know how much their family needs to eat for an entire year. This leads to lack of planning. Having better agricultural skills is not worth much if the farmer doesn’t know or care to put much effort into food production. It is all a hand-to-mouth lifestyle with no plan for tomorrow. For us to enable the poor families we work with to produce enough food, we need to start helping families analyze their food requirement. Then we need to help them to work hard to meet that goal or to seek alternate sources to cover any gaps. I believe that this kind of knowledge is something that is missing between development agencies and the people they work with.
I discussed this issue before the planting season with a woman from Ganjala village named Akello. She came to realize that she needed to know how much her plot of land was capable of producing. Akello asked a CRWRC field worker to determine the size of her farm and how much the farm can produce. Akello lives on a two-acre plot and was told by staff that her plot was capable of producing 40 bags of maize. She has never produced more than 10 bags of maize on her farm. Akello is determined to produce at least 25 to 30 bags of maize this year on her farm. She is doing all she can, as advised by the partner field staff, to produce more than 10 bags of maize this year. She now has a target to achieve. She dreams of producing a better harvest this year than she ever has.
It is true that if you do not know what you are looking for, then anything you get is what you deserve. This is the situation most of the poor families are in each day. They simply do not know their food requirement. They cannot even tell you how much food they need for a month. How can these people then produce enough food to last a year?
I am following Akello this year and am interested to know how motivated she will be. I have visited her farm, and she tells me that she has never seen her crops look the way they do now. She is caring for the crop by spreading a lot of manure. Akello tells me that all the “waste” from her house and from other gardens is no longer waste. She returns it to the soil, something she regrets that no one had taught her. Akello is busy trying to find out how much food they eat as a family. She is recording each week what they are eating and will average it and know how much of each food her family of eight consumes. She believes that she has enough land to provide food for the family, with some left over for sale. She is learning to keep poultry, rabbits, and to farm other crops such as beans and peas. Akello regrets not having learned this earlier, so that she would not have run out of food each year.
This is clear evidence that a little knowledge can be very helpful. Knowing how much food a plot can provide and knowing the food requirements of a family are incredibly important. Akello’s story is very empowering. She talks proudly of her improvements and is telling other women in the village to learn the same. She is now assisting her friend Auma to wisely utilize her land. She says God has a reason as to why He gave her family that amount of land. She believes her land is able to get her out of poverty. She loves farming more than ever before. She is spending much of her time on the farm. She has a goal to get and keep a goat for milk. It is indeed possible to produce enough food from a small farm to feed your family.
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This post shared at Simple Lives Thursday
Very interesting. I’m not sure the average American (including me!) does any better at knowing how much food is needed for a year. We all just run to the store when we need something.
I like how KNOWING what the ground was capable of producing gave Akello a goal to shoot for. Thanks for posting this.
Yeah, that occurred to me too. I would love to figure out one of these days how much I need. Would sure make gardening and canning a lot more motivating!