The macroeconomics of the rising price of staples are complex, but its effect on the lives of three women interviewed by Oxfam America is simple: they feel it every day.
For María Antonia León, or “Toñita”, life has never been easy. She remembers a time when she earned $3 to $4 a day selling tamales, pastries and snacks from her food cart and was able to buy weekly staples to feed her family of five. With this income, she could get six pounds of beans, half a pound of cheese, half a pound of cream, four pounds of rice, eggs, a chicken, and other basics.
“Before, with $20, I was able to fill a shopping cart. Now I can’t… I spend $40 and it’s not enough. I can’t even fill a shopping basket because everything is so expensive. Beans are $2.50, and cooking oil for 15 days is $2. We just can’t manage. This current crisis is really tough,” says Toñita. She doesn’t know how she will find the money to buy shoes or clothes.
But Toñita has now found a way to provide her family with nourishing food: Inspired by Saving for Change, she has started a garden and is raising chickens for their eggs. Saving for Change is an Oxfam program that encourages women to use the capital generated through their savings groups to participate in projects that help them achieve a sustainable livelihood. One such project seeks to promote women’s production capacity, entrepreneurial, and self-reliance skills by helping them establish vegetable gardens.
With her garden, Toñita has a new means to feed her family and avoid paying the high prices at the market. The cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and mustard greens she is growing are providing her family with the vitamins and proteins they weren’t getting before. And now she is teaching other women in her community how to do the same thing. The best part is she sells her extra produce at below market prices to her neighbors facing similar difficulties.
Ana Elizabeth Barrera works at a market in the city of Santa Tecla. She cooks and sells prepared foods, and therefore intimately knows the issue of rising food prices. Ana Elizabeth has seen the price of staples climb steadily over the past five years, but notes an accelerated rise of 60 to 70 percent in the past year, most notably with oil, rice, beans and sugar.
“Six to eight months ago I would invest $100 for oil, rice and other basics, and today I am spending between $150-160 which buys the same amount. Consequently, I have to raise my prices, which means that sales have gone down,” says Ana Elizabeth. She has lost 40 percent of her clientele and has had to let go one of her two employees.
Iris Madrid finds herself in a vulnerable position after losing her job a few weeks ago. Although her income was modest, it was stable and allowed her to buy basic items for her home and support her three children. Now, without a salary and facing rising food costs, she depends on her mother who sells beauty products via catalog.
“If there is detergent, then there is no soap. Or if we have soap, then we have no detergent. If we have beans, then we won’t be eating cheese. If we have cheese, we won’t be eating beans… It hurts because when you have children and they ask you for something, you can’t give it to them,” explains Iris. There are days when all they eat are the mangos from the tree outside her house.
Saving for Change is a program that is growing every day. Since its launch in 2005, it has grown to more than 488,000 members in five countries. The hope is that it will continue to grow and reach people like Ana Elizabeth and Iris, like it has reached Toñita.
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Unfortunately, that’s just what happened in September and October 2010. Abdoulaye N’Dao, a gregarious retired electrician with grey dread locks says the flooding in 2010 “was the most difficult compared to earlier ones… there was a lot more water.” He says his house had water up to his ankles in some of the rooms; he and his extended family of 25 people were bailing water out of the house and its courtyard for days. “Maybe crocodiles and frogs can live like that,” he says months later sitting in his now drier courtyard, “but not people.”
The heavy rains of 2010 triggered the fifth year in a row of serious flooding in Pikine, and capped off one of the rainiest years for Senegal since 1971. Dakar got a total of 20 inches, more than twice the normal amount of annual rainfall. Oxfam already was working with an organization in Pikine called Eau-Vie-Environnement (Water-Life-Environment, or EVE for short), and deployed $295,000 from Oxfam’s “Saving Lives 24/7 Fund” to help EVE respond.
The needs were urgent in Pikine: Oxfam and EVE estimated that 150,000 people in 3,600 families were badly affected, either completely displaced or living in flooded homes. With help from Oxfam, EVE planned an aggressive response, which included:
A fast survey of the worst-affected areas of Pikine, to identify families in the most need: EVE and Oxfam decided to focus its assistance on 2,812 families (roughly 30,000 people) primarily in seven of Pikine’s 16 districts.
Supporting 116 pumps, to remove water from 643 homes, 7 schools, and 18 mosques: EVE supplied fuel for pumps that moved more than a million cubic meters of water, which is something like 264 million gallons, enough to fill more than 400 Olympic swimming pools. This took 15,000 liters (about 4,000 gallons) of fuel. EVE worked with local authorities to help remove water from 228 roads in Pikine.
Removing waste: household garbage and other waste pose a severe health threat, so EVE supported the removal of 3,000 cubic meters (roughly 105,000 cubic feet) of garbage.
Delivering sand: to build up low-lying areas and shore up buildings at risk of being submerged, EVE delivered 10 truckloads of sand to each of seven districts in the city.
Promoting good hygiene: EVE distributed 2,806 hygiene kits with soap, bleach, clean buckets for storing water, mosquito nets, and water purification tablets. In follow-up visits, EVE estimated that 93.8 percent of the households it visited were using adequate methods to treat water, and that these and other measures likely helped reduce diarrhea cases from 3.12 percent of the households to 1.48 percent.
Direct financial support: With funds from Oxfam, EVE allocated 40, 000 CFA francs (about US$80) to more than 1,500 of the most severely affected households, so they could buy food, medicine, and clothing.
Abdou Diouf, the executive secretary of EVE, says Oxfam did not just provide some assistance during the crisis and then withdraw along with the flood water. “This is the first time since Pikine has experienced these floods, that an [international] organization has intervened during the flooding and has decided to continue intervening after the flooding,” he says during an interview in his office in Pikine in April. Diouf says EVE was able to use a small amount of money left over from a grant from Oxfam to deal with floods in 2009 to prepare for the 2010 rainy season. When the heavy rains hit in 2010, volunteer assessment teams were already in place and trained to take action.
Oxfam also is supporting EVE’s work in 2010 to help local governments to lobby for funding they can use to improve drainage systems, and keep the pumps running in chronically flooded areas of the city.
Diouf also says the cash transfers represented “… a revolution in our intervention this year. People really appreciated this; I had people coming to the office here to specifically thank EVE and Oxfam for the money.”
Each recipient got about 40,000 CFA francs, which is about US$85. It’s unusual for an aid organization to provide money instead of food, clothing, water, and other assistance. But it allows those affected by the flood to spend the money on what they need the most, rather than what an aid organization decides is best for them.
When Assiatou Niang got her cash, she immediately thought about food. “We had no food, so I bought a bag of rice,” she says. With 30 people living in the household, including most of her nine children as well as those of her injured sister, food was a priority. “I also needed cement to repair the house, and I needed money for daily expenses around the household.” Niang is 58, and recently widowed. The cash helped her feed her family and cover other expenses for about a month over the winter.
Distributing cash is also economically efficient, according to Isaac Massaga, Oxfam’s program officer based in Dakar. “If you distribute rice in a community, you are preventing the local dealers from selling their own stock,” he says. “By helping people access food in the local market, we also help suppliers, and at the same time it helps maintain the market.”
EVE and Oxfam found a credit union that supervised the distribution of the funds to only those with vouchers provided by EVE according to the results of its household surveys. EVE transferred more than US$130,000 to families in Pikine.
]]>Sorn says she spends less time weeding her fields than she used to since she started using a mechanical weeding device she helped create with assistance from Oxfam’s partner in Cambodia, RACHANA, an organization based in the southern Takeo province. When farmers use this new tool, they can accomplish in a few hours what used to take them many days.
Oxfam supported RACHANA in designing and testing the mechanical weeders that help farmers grow more rice. Switching to innovative rice-growing systems and using a mechanical weeder can create more than 100 percent gains in production—a huge improvement for small-scale rice growers like Sorn and her sister.
Sorn is among 100 families in the area growing rice using an array of special methods called the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI. SRI represents an accessible form of innovation for small-scale farmers like Sorn: it boosts yields through different ways of plowing fields and improving soil fertility, and of planting and transplanting rice. SRI helps the plants grow stronger and more resistant to pests and diseases. It doesn't require special seed varieties. And because the plants are healthier, the farmers need less fertilizer and pesticides, which saves them money and preserves the environment.
One of SRI’s techniques involves transplanting single seedlings farther apart, instead of transplanting them in bunches. The distance helps seedlings grow stronger roots. SRI farmers plant their seedlings in rows, so they can weed around the plants more easily. A mechanical weeder helps them speed up the process.
In Sorn’s village of Prey Pa’e, RACHANA found a metalworker named Ben Pen who was willing to work with the local farmers to develop the weeders. With RACHANA’s help, in 2009 he began to adapt designs from India and other countries; he optimized them based on feedback from women farmers. Sorn and about 20 others tested five prototypes. With Pen, they developed one- and two-wheel weeders, which farmers use for different soil and weed conditions. The weeders weigh between 4 and 12 pounds. Each of them has a long handle with which the farmers push narrow wheels with steel spikes, churning the earth and tearing up the weeds.
Most of the farmers responsible for testing the weeders were women. Though men help prepare the soil and assist with the harvest, women do most of the work in the fields. Pen and RACHANA wanted to make sure that the weeder designs are suitable for them. “These weeders are helping women avoid back pain, and neck pain,” Pen says. “They can stand up, and it’s a lot faster.”
Sorn moves down the rows between the rice plants pushing the weeder in front of her like a lawn mower. The tool splashes through a thin layer of water, cutting up clumps of grass and mud.
“There’s quite a difference when you use the weeding tools,” Sorn says. “If you weed by hand you only get the top of the weed, you don’t get the root, and it grows again. When you use the weeding tool, it destroys the root and churns the weed into the soil—it’s better for the soil.”
Sorn farms a little less than two acres. Having the weeder helps Sorn and her sister get their weeding done faster. She says saving this time and labor is particularly important for her now: her husband passed away and her six children are all grown and have left the village to work and study. She’s 55, alone, and needs the help.
RACHANA’s research showed that by combining weeders with SRI, farmers could increase their production to average 5.6 tons per hectare, up from an average of 2.2 tons using traditional techniques. (A hectare is about 2.45 acres.) The organization ordered 900 of the three most popular weeders from Pen; it is selling them to farmers across the country. The tools cost about $20—a significant investment, prompting groups of two or three neighbors to buy the tools together and share them.
The investment is worth the time saved: the women in Prey Pa’e say it takes three people two weeks to weed a hectare, and by the time they finish, the weeds are already growing again. “With the weeder, three people can finish in one morning,” says Pen Rat, who was part of the prototype testing team.
Sorn says she helped test the one-wheel weeder, and suggested that Pen lower the angle of the handle, so women would be pushing at waist level. “I thought women would have more strength to push and pull,” she says.
Simple forms of innovation, like these mechanical weeders, encourage farmers to come together, share their ideas, and play a role in developing technological improvements for their farming. This type of endeavor is just a small part of Oxfam’s work to transform agriculture for the poorest farmers in Cambodia.
Farmers like Sorn Ken confirm this: “Having this weeder is like having another person,” she says.
]]>The Convention, which in its current form expires this year, is a binding international treaty that holds major food aid donors – the US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia and others – to a minimum level of food aid for addressing emergency needs. Oxfam is calling for substantial reforms to this treaty to help address increased need and highly volatile prices.
“In the vast majority of emergency food crises the problem is not a scarcity of food but people’s ability to buy the food that is available,” said Eric Munoz, policy advisor for Oxfam America. “In most cases hungry people need money to buy food and cannot afford to wait for the arrival of a ship to travel halfway around the world.”
“The Food Aid Convention needs to ensure our aid dollars provide a bigger bang for the buck. It must be brought up to date with modern approaches to deal with food crises and strip the inefficiencies that cost time, money and lives,” said Munoz.
Far too much emergency aid to address hunger is too slow, and much is wasted on the shipping costs of food stocks, particularly from the US and Japan. On average, more than 50 percent of the cost of food aid shipped from the United States goes to pay shipping and procurement costs. Reforms to the Convention, especially those that encourage the local and regional purchase of food aid, can help to cut inefficiencies and provide taxpayers with a much greater return on their investments.
A reformed Convention would broaden its approach to addressing emergencies including by providing cash to purchase food locally and providing agricultural inputs to farmers to recover from disasters. This assistance should be “need-based”, driven by the levels of aid necessary to meet humanitarian requirements. Instead of focusing purely on the amount of food pledged, the Convention should focus on the number of people it needs to reach.
A new approach would improve people’s means of obtaining enough food to eat during and immediately after a crisis. The Convention must also be integrated into the emerging global food security mechanisms such as the UN’s Committee on World Food Security, which will help create a more coherent strategy between emergency and longer-term efforts to tackle global hunger.
“Negotiators should work to bring greater transparency and accountability to food aid. The current Convention is shrouded in secrecy making it extremely difficult to know if and how members are meeting their commitments. This information is not publicly available. Increasing transparency will help to determine how effective food aid programs are and what changes must be made to reduce hunger,” said Munoz.
At the close of 2008, up to five million people faced food shortages and malnutrition was stalking more than one million young children and half a million women. About 80 percent of Afghans depend largely on agriculture to feed their families, but the government has limited ability to support small farmers and respond to spiraling food prices and persistent drought. Lack of access to adequate food is one of the major factors contributing to the country’s high mortality rates particularly among the youngest.
Foreign aid is providing vital assistance to Afghans, but much of the aid is over-centralized, has not brought needed change in the countryside, and in large part is being allocated to the southern provinces which host international forces.
Oxfam has been working in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years and supporting partner organizations in all but two of the country’s 34 provinces.
]]>As Ag Demba described coaxing crops from the drought-prone soil, dozens of Iowa farmers watched from hay bales scattered around the barn.
That October Saturday marked just one stop on a nationwide speaking tour by Ag Demba and three of his fellow small-holder farmers—Le Ngoc Thach, from Vietnam; Jacqueline Morette, from Haiti; and Duddeda Sugunavva, from India. Brought together by Oxfam America, Africare, and WWF-International, the farmers spoke at venues from the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines to the World Bank offices in Washington, DC. They told their stories to agricultural scientists, US Senators’ staffers, Florida churchgoers, Oxfam volunteers, and ordinary people all over the country. All four spoke about the obstacles they faced in their efforts to feed their families, and the gains they’d made when they used innovative methods to improve their harvests.
“The people who feed the world are facing enormous challenges—from climate change to economic hardship. And that leads to widespread hunger,” said Jim French, Oxfam America regional advocacy lead and a farmer from Kansas. “But the answers are simple: We need to invest in small-holder farmers, and give them the tools that can help them become more resilient.”
It was early that same morning—October 16, World Food Day—when the four international farmers arrived at Neher Acres, a family-owned 500-acre corn and soybean farm in Grundy Center, Iowa. Thach strode out into the cornfield first, his slight, dark-suited figure nearly vanishing among the tall stalks. Morette followed; plucking a ripe ear of corn, she skimmed it clean with her thumb, cupping her palm to catch the golden kernels.
Soon the farmers, their translators, and various staffers crowded around Lyle Neher as he explained the workings of his family’s farm.
“How do you plant the fields?” asked Sugunavva, her flame-bright sari ruffling in the wind.
“How many acres per bag of seed?” asked Thach. A few minutes later, Neher’s son went into the farmhouse and returned with a printout he’d made for the visitors that converted the farm’s measurements into the metric system.
Though harvest time was over, the Nehers had left a patch of corn still standing for their guests. One by one, the four farmers clambered up into the cab of a red combine harvester, taking turns driving the bulky, roaring machine through the rows.
“It’s exciting for me to see these methods, but sad, too,” said Morette, leader of the Oxfam partner organization the United Women’s Association of Pouille. “I wish we had access to this kind of equipment.” She demonstrated corn harvesting methods at home: one person walking through the rows to pluck the ripe ears while another strips the kernels by hand. She said it would be hard to imagine a field this size in Haiti, where the average farmer’s plot measures about 3.7 acres.
The scale felt more familiar at the farmers’ next stop. At Marshalltown, Iowa, Community College, an agricultural extension program teaches new and immigrant farmers to cultivate small plots of land using sustainable methods. As students demonstrated a composting worm box and a moveable pen called a “chicken tractor,” Morette sketched careful diagrams on a yellow notepad. “These are techniques I can adapt to use at home,” she said.
At High Hopes Gardens, an organic farm in Logan Township, Iowa, the visitors sat down for a lunch of locally-grown food, from crisp vegetables to a sweet raspberry cobbler. Bees hummed in the air as about 70 Iowa farmers and their families joined them at picnic tables in the shadow of the red barn.
Later, everyone crowded inside to hear the visiting farmers’ stories. Morette spoke first, describing how she helps women farmers convert crops into more long-lasting and profitable products, like jams and peanut butter. Ag Demba, Thach, and Suganavva talked about their successes using the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), an innovative technique that yields more rice using less water and fertilizer. “Now, thanks to SRI, we can eat three meals a day instead of two,” said Ag Demba, who explained that his village used the surplus funds from the rice harvest to build its first school.
Many of the Iowa farmers asked questions, comparing the guests’ farming techniques to their own methods here in the US.
“I grew up on a farm, in a small town, with an open mind,” said Ellen Walsh-Rosmann, who runs a 200-acre Iowa organic farm with her husband and his family. “A lot of Iowa farmers claim that we feed the world. If we truly do, then we should think about poverty and hunger, and our relationships with farmers worldwide.”
It was just one day in what French described as a successful effort to bring the farmers’ stories to life for Americans. “Our role at Oxfam is not to speak for these farmers, but to bring them together with those who can support their efforts,” he said.
And in Iowa, he added, their audience may have understood the message best of all.
“No matter where we farm, we all share a common bond with the land,” said French. “We all want the same things: clean water, a decent living, food on the table. If we can understand that, we can come to solutions together.”
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Millions of people in the region—including Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso-- have confronted food shortages as a consequence of erratic rains in 2008 and 2009 that led to poor harvests, withered pastures, and a lack of water. Widespread poverty has compounded those challenges.
For many, the difficulty in the weeks leading up to the this year’s harvest in October and November is particularly acute as they have exhausted not only their food supplies but have sold off assets, such as livestock, in an effort to feed their families.
While Niger has been at the epicenter of the crisis, with about seven million people facing hunger—almost half its population--forecasters are now predicting a solid harvest for the country, even as flooding wiped out some fields and killed many heads of livestock. And a good distribution of rains in Burkina Faso has meant the crops are growing well there, also.
But robust harvests won’t ease the strain for many families who have gone deep into debt trying to feed themselves. One good harvest will not be enough for them to recover.
Additionally, some families have not been able to plant at all: They had no choice but to eat the seeds they intended to sow.
For herders who rely mostly on their animals for food and income, the rains have restored the grass in their pastures, which in turn has improved the health of their livestock. As cattle and goats grow stronger again, their value goes up, giving owners more purchasing power in the local markets.
Families who earn their living from crops grown in rain-fed fields, however, continue to struggle.
“For non-pastoralist communities who depend on a good harvest, we have not yet seen the end,” said Oxfam’s West Africa emergency coordinator, Philippe Conraud, speaking to the IRIN news agency about Mali. “We are still in the peak of crisis, and emergency activities need to continue.”
The problems in Chad are particularly worrisome. About 60 percent of the households, or 1.6 million people, in the western part of the country are grappling with a severe food crisis. For those suffering from malnutrition, access to care can be a challenge: Some patients have to travel more than 120 miles to reach health facilities.
The prices of basic commodities in the markets continue to rise and overall food prices are at least 35 percent higher than the five-year average. Additionally, with the arrival of the rainy season, floods have affected more than 100,000 people in nine regions of Chad, destroying homes and wrecking crops. And now there is a new threat: cholera. Hundreds of cases have been reported.
Oxfam, which has helped more than 600,000 people snared by the crisis, is calling for a scaled-up response now—and over the long-term.
“Many people have lost everything due to the severity of the crisis. They have lost their livestock, their livelihoods and are now in excessive debt,” says Dawit Beyene, Oxfam America’s deputy director of humanitarian response. “We need flexible and predictable funding to support the development of national social protection systems and sustainable livelihoods, and to increase the provision of essential services to prevent future crises.”
In Chad, Oxfam has been helping people in the Sila and Guéra regions by distributing food and running agricultural and livelihood support projects. In Niger, the ganecy has organized the distribution of food and fodder, provided cereals at subsidized prices, distributed seeds, and bought weakened livestock from herders at above-market prices, distributing the meat for free to the poorest families. And in Mali Oxfam has been distributing food and animal feed as well.
“The situation in West Africa may seem impossibly complex and difficult to solve but if only the international community would invest in long-term predictable development work we could make sure families are a lot less vulnerable to shocks in the future,” says Raphael Sindaye, Oxfam’s deputy regional director in West Africa.
]]>While time is running out, the global crises push the Millennium Development Goals desperately off course. The only chance of avoiding failure is a rescue plan for all MDGs that includes the necessary measures, both political and financial. Halving hunger is still possible if developing countries take the lead with the right policies and investments, donor countries increase dramatically their aid to agriculture, food security and social protection under nationally and regionally-driven plans, and the global issues affecting food security are collectively addressed.
]]>It’s supported by PADELAN, or the Project to Assist Local Development and Agroforestry in Nippes, a collaboration between Oxfam Quebec and the Ministry of Agriculture that uses money from the Canadian International Development Agency to fund projects identified as priorities by local development committees.
And in Anse-a-Veau, this store was one of those priorities--desperately needed.
Several doors down, Mayor Telisme Dutelien sits behind his desk in a small office in the town hall. On a mid-May morning, the room is dim and sweltering. No lights shine and no fan churns: the community’s generator, which provided electricity, stopped working the month before, explains Dutelien. It’s just one of the problems that has plagued Anse-a-Veau in recent years, ever since its population began to drop in the 1980s, dragging the community’s commercial vitality with it.
The decline of Anse-a-Veau is symptomatic of what has happened across Haiti as Port-au-Prince, the capital and hub of opportunity, sucked people from the countryside for jobs, for schools, for a better life—or the promise of one. But in January, disaster struck there: an earthquake leveled great swaths of the city, killing 230,000 people and shaking the nation to its core. That calamity brought into sharp focus the drawbacks of centering so much of a country’s lifeblood in one sprawling place.
Now, the call for decentralization, long a national goal, is again sounding loud and clear. As international donors promise enormous financial resources to help Haiti rebuild, what are the steps it needs to take to answer that call? Some ideas can be found in the initiatives Oxfam had launched before the quake—programs based on the needs of communities, as voiced by the people who live in them.
They are small, but steady steps and the store in Anse-a-veau is one of them. Open since December 2009, it operates six days a week, its shelves of canned milk and crackers, matches and razor blades plugging the household needs local growers can’t fill themselves.
Nearby, in Paillant, Guerline Rubin stands at the entry to her house, carrying a stack of cardboard crates loaded with eggs. They are from the chickens clucking in a henhouse in the corner of the yard—another of PADELAN’s community projects designed to help local families find ways to boost their incomes.
The chickens belong to Rubin’s father, a participant in the egg-production project which has targeted 20 households in the area. Each of them received 60 chickens, whose value the farmers will slowly pay back—at the rate of 500 gourdes a month, or $12.40—to the local development council that provided the birds. They lay about an egg a day.
For Rubin, that means trips to the market at least twice a week to sell her family’s cache. She ports the fragile eggs via tap-tap, a small colorful bus that lurches over the dirt roads between villages. Each egg fetches about five gourdes, netting Rubin’s family about 2 gourdes, or about 5 cents.
Added up, that bit of income becomes a precious resource for farmers trying to put food on their tables, pay for medical care, and have a little cash left over to invest in a hardier variety of seeds that can promise a decent harvest—and give families a reason to stay in the countryside.
A few hills over, Marie Camel Rubin bends over her field of beans, corn, and manioc. Behind her, in the distance, a low building rises from the sea of green—it’s a new mill built with the help of PADELAN to grind corn and sorghum. Open six days a week, the mill saves local farmers the time-consuming trip via bus to another community to have their grain ground.
Rubin is one of the local farmers happy to have their own mill nearby. And while it saves her time, she still struggles to make ends meet. Weeding along with her through the rows is her son, Noel Jolins. He’s 8—and he would be in school if his mother could afford the fees. But he had to quit when she couldn’t scrape together the money to send him.
That’s one of the reasons Laventure Benad is so eager to see a small irrigation system completed in the hills of Colora in central Haiti. The father of seven children, he can afford to send only four of them to school now. But with irrigation—and the opportunity it will provide for three harvests a year instead of just one—Benad hopes he will have not only more food for his family, but enough income to pay for additional schooling.
“We’d like to go forward,” he says as a pair of young men behind him hammer at a heap of rocks, cracking them into gravel to help build the irrigation system. Channeled into a pipe, water from the mountain stream flowing by them will find its way into more than 60 acres of fields below where it will help 150 farmers.
With the help of Proyecto Binacional Artibonito, an Oxfam Quebec-supported project known as PROBINA, the irrigation could eventually bring them a measure of financial independence, say farmers. They expect that within three years they will be doing well enough to b able to buy their own seeds and fertilizer.
For Markens Louidort, a 26-year-old student in Liancourt in the Artibonite Valley, education holds the key to a better future, he says. He has enrolled in a computer-training program offered by APPEL, or Association des Parents and des Professeurs d’Ecole de Liancourt, an Oxfam partner that provides post-secondary vocational training.
“The world is going on with technology and it’s important for someone to learn computers,” says Louidort. In a country with unemployment as high as 70 percent, Louidort is hoping this new, hard-won skill will help him land a job.
Three days a week, for four hours each day, he settles in behind a computer in the stifling APPEL classroom. A series of batteries from Oxfam, recharged with the help of a generator at a nearby radio station, provide the electricity for the computers. Every seat is taken. This is the most popular class APPEL offers and some students share computers. A mood of deep concentration hangs over them.
At the head of the classroom, teacher Dieunel Prince talks the students through the next step of a program that will allow them to format certificates. Later, he explains privately that one of the biggest challenges he faces in working with these students is the fact that so many of them never had the opportunity to learn how to type—a handicap for those hoping to dive quickly into this new field.
That gap in learning is an indication of the struggles Haiti has had with providing a solid education for its citizens—about a quarter of the districts have no schools and 38 percent of Haitians over the age of 15 are illiterate. Education is one of the fundamental services rural regions will need to offer if decentralization is ever to become a reality for Haiti.
Michelle Lisette Casimir, mayor of Saint Michel in Artibonite, knows that well. Many of the families in the area sent their children to Port-au-Prince for advanced schooling, and some of them died in the quake. What Casimir longs for Saint Michel to have is a professional school of its own.
“We can’t talk about the future without being concerned about the youth—they way they are living,” says Casimir, adding that education is her top development wish. “With education...we will keep them.”
]]>We know some aid, including from Oxfam, has been getting through in recent weeks and months. But we also know the international aid effort has been too slow – funds from donors have been committed late, and aid on the ground isn’t coming through fast enough. As the people here face their toughest three months until harvest time in October, there’s a desperate need for international political engagement to ramp up the speed and the scale of the response.
In Niger’s capital Niamey, a gentle-seeming city of sandy-mud colored low houses and a population of around 800,000 people, there are few immediate signs of the food crisis. There are small food stalls along many of the tree-lined, dusty streets and the “petit marche” – or small market – is crammed with stalls selling food and other items. But even in the capital, many people are too poor to pay for sufficient food and the picture in the countryside is much much worse.
We drove two hours from Niamey, along a rough dirt track through the semi-arid, mostly flat and desolate landscape. It’s stony and sandy with a few short dry-looking trees and bushes, though some are turning green where a bit of rain has started to fall. We see painfully thin cattle, goats and donkeys, their ribs visible as we drive by. Men, women and children are hard at work in some patches of land, planting seeds by hand to take advantage of any rain that has fallen. It’s hard work, and often undone again by sudden harsh desert winds.
We stop briefly in the main town in the area, Ouallam, and talk to a serious, welcoming official there, who explains that more than 200 of the 300 or so villages in this area are facing severe food shortages. Due to the drought, thousands of animals have died or are too thin to be sold for a decent price or even to provide a good meal for the herders.
The situation is as bad as the deep crisis of 2005, our host tells us—and worse, even, because people have less money now than they did then. But at least speculators have not managed to drive the prices as high as they did five years ago. And, importantly, this time around the new Nigerien government has recognized the crisis and invited donors and aid organizations like Oxfam to support them in tackling the problem. Now, some aid has arrived – but much more will be needed in the coming months.
Driving on to the nearby village of Tondi Kiwindi, we find a small muddy river flooding the road into the village. Our driver wades across to make sure our vehicle won’t get stuck and we plow through. Tondi Kiwindi is a small community of mud-brick rectangular houses, quiet in the midday heat. The local village leader welcomes us and tells us about the difficulties here and in the surrounding villages.
He talks about how many animals have died, about how little food villagers have, about the difficulties of surviving the next three months until the harvest. The rains here are a month late, though further north they have started.
The village leader thanks us for the work we’ve done with a local aid group to buy sick and thin animals at better prices than villagers can get in the markets, and to provide animal feed and other support such as cash for work programs. He tells us that the women, especially, have taken advantage of the opportunity to earn some income through the programs as many of the men have migrated away to towns to look for work. They’ll return to till and plant the fields when the rains start.
But when the rain really comes, says our host, the river we crossed to get into the village will rise and there will be no access to the community. Can we help, he asks us.
It’s a story across a lot of the region: rains are desperately needed to ensure a good harvest this year, but until October when the crops are ripe, rains can block access and make delivery of aid much harder or impossible. And the rains lower the temperature a little—bringing death to thousands of weakened animals.
In a five-mile ride across the desert from Tondi Kiwindi, we come to a smaller village called Ko Kaina. The situation we find here is utterly desperate: The villagers talk to us of famine and question whether they can survive to the autumn.
We sit with four women who tell us they have nothing left to eat at all. They say that this year is especially bad. Last year at least the animals had enough to eat, but now the cows and goats are dead or dying. In hard times, their tradition is to share—neighbors helping neighbors—but now no one has anything to share.
“Everyone is down, down, down,” they say. “Our stomachs are empty.”
Their last source of food is a small, hard round green pea called “wanza.” It has a bitter taste, but villagers eat it when there is nothing else to consume. To find the wanza, the women set out from the village at 5 a.m. walking miles in their hunt. They ask me to taste one of the peas to see how bitter and sour it is; the unpleasant taste stays in my mouth for an hour. The peas first need drying in the sun then soaking several times in water before they become at all possible to digest.
They show us their only other food – a small bowl of cooked leaves from short small trees that grow in the dry earth nearer to the village. A woman puts a small amount in her mouth and mimics being sick, to show me how ill and malnourished they are on this diet. A short distance away, a small group of children stares at us hoping, I think, that we have brought relief. They are thin and listless.
The women explain that their animals have been weak and dying for months now and no longer produce milk. Some are even too thin to slaughter for food. A few days back, the women tell us, the villagers killed one weak calf before it died. They needed it for food. But four children became ill from eating the meat and had to be taken to a larger village nearby for medical attention. That cost money the families didn’t had and had to borrow—leaving them in debt, too.
People are so weak, the women explain to us, that after a few minutes working in the fields – vital work – they are already too tired to keep going.
“We are weak and dying like our animals,” they tell us. “If it goes on like this, some of us will die and some God will keep alive ‘til the next harvest.”
Oxfam has launched an emergency program to provide support to 800,000 people across Niger, Mali, and Chad. In Niger, the organization is helping 400,000 people by distributing food and supplies to the poorest households. Oxfam is also buying weak livestock at above-market rates to help herders who need to sell some of their animals. Meat from the livestock is being distributed to some of the most vulnerable households. In Mali, the organization will help 200,000 people by distributing food as well as fodder for livestock. And in Chad, distributions of food and seeds are accompanying agriculture support projects, with a goal of helping 200,000 people.
This is the reality of hunger in the Sahel region of West Africa, where more than 10 million people are now in the grip of a food crisis triggered, in part, by patchy rainfall last year thatled to a plunge in the production of cereals. In Chad alone, the cereal harvest fell by 34 percent. And pasture—critical for the well-being of the region’s livestock on which many families depend for food and income—is severely lacking because of the poor rains.
But the increasing intensity of seasonal droughts is not the only source of the problem. A lack of investment in agriculture and herding, and insecure land tenure also play a role in the suffering some of the world’s poorest people endure.
In Niger, where the crisis stalks more than seven million people, the country’s youngest children are among the hardest hit. IRIN, the UN news agency, reported in late June that acute malnutrition rates among children younger than five in Niger had spiked 42 percent higher than they were this time a year ago—to nearly 17 percent. That means almost half a million children are acutely malnourished, according to IRIN. Many others—almost half of Niger’s children—live with chronic undernourishment, said IRIN.
Other countries are affected by the food crisis, too: Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, and northern Nigeria.
Early warning systems revealed last fall that the Sahel was headed toward trouble, but the alarms failed to rouse a robust regional and international response. The amount of emergency assistance has, so far, been insufficient to meet the large-scale needs of the region. The West Africa consolidated appeal—a joint humanitarian fund-raising effort by groups working in the region, including the UN—is only 36 percent funded. The appeal includes support for food security activities in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania. About $69 million is needed to respond to the emergency in Niger alone. In Chad, the World Food Program needs almost $20 million to respond to rising food needs.
With the next harvest months away, and the approaching rainy season threatening to impede delivery of assistance to more remote areas, concerns of farmers like Fadoul Acheul are growing more acute. He is a 53-year-old father of eight children living on the outskirts of Mongo in Chad and has run out of options that could help tide his family over.
“The mango trees haven’t borne fruit this year, so we can’t sell those,” he said in April. “Also, there isn’t enough water to maintain our family orchard.” The family had used up its store of cereal a month earlier and was relying only on the income Fadoul’s wife made by selling a few items in the market.
The day Fadoul lamented his dry orchard was the day he had to make a decision—the same one many families now confront: selling their livestock. To get food, Fadoul sold his last ram, fetching just enough money to keep his family going for another week.
“Five years ago, the world ignored the warning signs from Niger, failed to act rapidly, and lives were lost,” said Mamadou Biteye, an Oxfam regional director in West Africa. “The international community cannot make the same mistake and again condemn many children to an early death.”
Oxfam has launched an emergency program to provide support to 800,000 people across Niger, Mali, and Chad. In Niger, the organization is helping 400,000 people by distributing food and supplies to the poorest households. Oxfam is also buying weak livestock at above-market rates to help herders who need to sell some of their animals. Meat from the livestock is being distributed to some of the most vulnerable households. In Mali, the organization will help 200,000 people by distributing food as well as fodder for livestock. And in Chad, distributions of food and seeds are accompanying agriculture support projects, with a goal of helping 200,000 people.
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“More than a billion people in the world go hungry on a daily basis. This initiative, coupled with urgent Congressional action, could really deliver in the fight against hunger,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. "Feed the Future is based on the truth that real change for people in poverty begins with recipient countries themselves. This ownership-based approach is the best way to ensure that we are giving poor countries the help they need to solve their own hunger challenges."
“These new details provide important information about how the US will structure its assistance and underscore the Obama Administration’s commitment,” said Offenheiser. “This initiative further demonstrates US global leadership in promoting agriculture and food security.”
The US approach to food security abroad has been uncoordinated across US agencies. Shah’s announcement today dovetails with renewed momentum in Congress around the Global Food Security Act, which aims to provide a more comprehensive strategy for the US to address food insecurity abroad, make emergency responses more effective and build long-term food security by supporting smallholder farmers and women food producers.
“Congress must approve the President’s request for $1.6 billion to support the initiative, and follow suit by passing the Global Food Security Act,” said Offenheiser. “The bill, introduced by Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Robert Casey (D-PA), will enshrine in our law our commitment to supporting smallholder farmers as they seek to find ways to escape hunger and poverty.”
“The administration’s commitment to fighting hunger and poverty is obvious today, but we’re still looking for an overarching US Global Development Strategy from the President as soon as possible,” said Offenheiser. “Such a strategy – of which the initiative announced today would be part – is needed to ensure that our government has a clear mission and game plan for supporting the efforts of poor people and their governments to build stronger, better societies.”
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Planted long ago by a French worker from a nearby farm, jatropha was unknown to Maluleque. He’s since become one of the most experienced local cultivators of this unusual plant, now prized for its seeds used to produce biodiesel fuel. In 2006, when an international company approached Maluleque about managing the nursery for its 27,000-acre jatropha plantation in his town, he leapt at the chance.
“I was so happy,” he says, sitting beneath the jatropha bush. “I wanted to get a car and build a nicer house and educate my children at a higher level.” The company, called ESV Group, piped water into the village. It hired doctors and teachers to work there.
Right now Mozambique is devoting millions of dollars and more than 200,000 acres of land to growing biofuel crops for ethanol and biodiesel. The country is encouraging foreign investors to use its land in exchange for jobs and fuel to reduce its dependence on oil imports.
The diversion of agriculture from food production to biofuel crops represents a significant contribution to increasing food prices. Between 2005 and 2008, global food prices spiraled up more than 80 percent according to research by Oxfam and others. This has been a significant burden for poor people who often spend more than half their income on food. The food price increases pushed more than 100 million additional people into poverty globally. Some studies show that increased production of biofuel is responsible for 16 percent of that food price increase.
Small-scale farmers increase their vulnerability when they commit to biofuel projects. Things were looking good in Inhassune that first year, but then ESV started to have financing problems. When it abandoned the venture, local government officials ordered all the workers to stay on the job. Not all have, but for those like Maluleque who have continued to work, 14 long months have passed without pay.
Maluleque says he’s kept farming his own land but has been unable to afford to plant all of it. He planted on several acres, and cut back to one daily meal. In November 2009, Maluleque reported that he had practically exhausted his resources and was considering going to South Africa to look for work.
About four hours south of Inhassune, farmers in Nzeve face a different problem. This village of 137 people—located in the rolling, coastal hills near the resort town of Bilene—was told by the government that farmers each had to release about 80 percent of their land (usually about six acres) for a 49,000-acre jatropha project led by a foreign company. Locals were told that working on the plantation would offset any loss of food production. The government said that since the soil in the area was sandy, it was better for growing jatropha than corn anyway. It seemed reasonable until the company ran into cash flow problems and laid off workers.
Violeta Sithole, 47, lives in Nzeve and worked in the jatropha nursery until she lost her job. “They were going to give us a school and electricity … but we are not seeing any of it,” she says. “Now that I am no longer working, we need more money and we are not growing enough in our field. All we eat is cassava.”
Reports from communities about pressures on farmers have prompted Oxfam to begin studying the effect of biofuel production on farmers in southern Africa. Preliminary findings show that small-scale farmers are the ones caught in the middle of these global trends. They welcome jobs because it’s hard to earn cash in poor communities, so people in Inhassune and Nzeve want local plantations to succeed. But, the government and companies gambling on jatropha, also put local farmers at risk when they demand land and make no plans in case the scheme fails.
Fans of the jatropha plant rave about its potential: they say it can grow almost anywhere and needs little water. And—although jatropha is a weed and poisonous, known as “bellyache bush”—in 2009, Air New Zealand flew a jet powered in part by the plant’s oil.
Sound too good to be true? It may be. Dutch researchers say jatropha needs good soil and more water than corn or sugar cane for optimal growth. Repurposing land without local input can be disastrous because communities risk losing areas valuable for hunting or grazing livestock. Poor countries must move forward carefully and ensure that local communities are made aware of potential costs and benefits and have a voice in decision making.
Editor’s note: ESV announced in late November 2009 that it had sold its jatropha venture in Mozambique to an Italian partnership for $4 million—contingent on payment of all back wages and taxes by ESV.
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