FAO/Giulio Napolitano
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf went on a 24-hour public hunger strike to express solidarity with over a billion people suffering from hunger and launched a petition drive to support ending hunger.
In this special briefing, AllAfrica is shining a spotlight on food security in Africa. Hunger affects more than one billion people worldwide, most of them in Africa. Population growth, urbanization, gender inequalities, climate change and access to markets are just some of the factors that affect Africa’s ability to produce food. But Africans, on their own and with the support of international organizations, are coming up with innovative ways to boost sustainable food production. Many say a Green Revolution is possible, with the right support. “Eighty percent of farmers in Africa are smallholder farmers. The majority of them are women,” says Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad). “They produce 80 percent of the food that is consumed by Africans. Obviously, if these are the people that produce the food that we eat we must invest in smallholder agriculture.”
Tami Hultman/AllAfrica
As President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of Tanzania was about to leave Dar es Salaam on November 15 to attend the World Food Summit in Rome, he sat down at State House to discuss a range of issues with AllAfrica. One of them was food security.
Mitchell Ajida/allAfrica.com
Residents in the capital, Harare, have increasingly turned to urban gardening. They grow produce just about anywhere they can – in backyards, vacant lots, on roadsides and on rooftops.
Leaders at the World Summit on Food Security pledged renewed commitment to eradicate hunger from the face of the earth sustainably and at the earliest date.
With droughts and floods, attributed to climate change, on the rise, Kenya's small farmers are gaining an edge through greenhouses bought with loans from the Kenya Women Finance Trust.
Farmers in post-conflict Liberia struggling to rejuvenate production battle many obstacles, including malaria, crop pests and floods. “I want to send food to the market this year,” says Nathaniel Ziayee.
The Women of Fezeka Community Garden Gladys Phuza, 87, although the oldest of the Fezeka gardeners is by all accounts the strongest. "She is stronger than any of us!" testifies fellow gardener Joyce Nyebela. "Old people are made from different clay Phuza also eats the most spinach of all the women.
Shaba Esiteng, 77, was moved from central Cape Town to Gugulethu in 1963 by the apartheid government. She worked as a domestic worker for most of her life and brought up five children on her own. "If I had the garden before, while I was young," she says, "I couldn't have gone to work - I would have worked in the garden."
Phillipina Ndamane, 72, supports her sister and nine small children (six grandchildren and three others, all orphans). The vegetables she grows go a long way towards feeding them. "I like this garden so much," she says. "I will carry on gardening till I die."
Widespread hunger is not a symptom of low food supplies; it’s a symptom of poverty. Often there is food available, but people who are poor simply cannot afford to buy it. To truly tackle the problem, we must not just address the symptom. We must deal with the underlying causes, or hunger will continue.In order to address hunger and poverty and prepare for the increased food prices and likely supply problems in the future, we must invest in farmers today.Investing in agriculture—including crops, livestock and aquaculture—is a powerful poverty reduction tool, writes Oxfam America president, Raymond Offenheiser.
La fédération des agropasteurs de la communauté rurale de Diender, une localité située à 50 kilomètres de Dakar, a mené à bien sa première tâche destinée à préserver et sauvegarder son patrimoine foncier, face aux agressions multiples de l'érosion hydrique et éolienne afin de promouvoir une agriculture biologique à coté de celle dite conventionnelle, plus saine et moins coûteuse.
Widows are often looked down on and pitied in Kenya. But the widows in the village of Angata Barakoi in the Transmara area of Kenya were determined to help each other and make a life for themselves, without relying on handouts and charity from relatives. Eighty-six widows banded together to form a support group to deal with the effects of HIV, grief, and the difficulties of living in a community where they had lost their status after the death of their husbands. The group decided to support themselves by growing their own maize.
Many Liberians uprooted by war who now live in Monrovia are engaged in agriculture to feed themselves and earn money because of high unemployment. But production has not reached pre-war levels.
Rising costs and falling prices are hurting pineapple producers in Côte d'Ivoire, and many have stopped growing the fruit altogether. But a government rescue plan with donor support is raising hopes for some improvement.
African scientists are working with their western counterparts to bring the benefits of digital mapping to the continent, says Dr. Peter Okoth of the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute.
Gender inequalities are a key impediment to achieving food security in many households in sub-Saharan Africa, says Marian Bradley of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad). A number of programs are helping to change cultural practices that undermine food security.
The windmill brought electricity to William's village in Malawi. A second one powered a water pump that could battle the drought and famine that loomed with every season. Read more on his blog >>>
Dr. Namanga Ngongi describes the work of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), which he leads.
Annina Lubbock from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) describes how 'gender mainstreaming' is an essential component of efforts to improve food security in Africa.
Daniel Mataruka, director of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), discusses prospects for genetically modified (GM) crops on the continent.
Ethan Zuckerman reflects on the inspiring story of William Kamkwamba, the young man from Malawi who built a windmill and better future for himself and his family. more >>>
Akin Adesina, vice president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), talks about evolving programs to improve food security across the continent.
Dr. Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, told AllAfrica that trees on farmland can play a transformative role in rural agriculture.
Sakina Mati is a farmer and community leader in the village of Guidan Batoye, in the Maradi Region of Niger. She began to manage the regeneration of useful trees on her fields 15 years ago together with other women farmers in the village. While she started with no trees on her farm, she now has up to 150 trees. She is very committed to this effort and is now leading the village committee that supervises the village-wide effort of tree and vegetation regeneration. She is among the most respected people of the village because of her commitment to the protection of the environment.
Yacouba Savadogo is a farmer, community leader and natural resource innovator from the village of Gourma, in Burkina Faso. Yacouba began to experiment with planting pits and small dikes in order to produce more sorghum and millet on his degraded land in 1979 after observing other farmers use similar techniques through an Oxfam program. By digging deeper pits and adding manure, he brought land back into production. After trees grew spontaneously in the pits, he began to protect them. His barren land was steadily turned into a forest with diverse, useful tree species.
A potentially serious infestation of desert locusts has broken out in Mauritania, but experts are hopeful that quickly implemented countermeasures will prevent a repeat of the plague that hit the region five years ago.
High-achieving women are breaking stereotypes. Across Africa women produce more than 70 percent of the continent's food, but most of the farming is at a subsistence level, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Hunger associated with climate changes and more frequent droughts can be prevented using new approaches, including irrigation, grain stores and wells to harvest rains, says an Oxfam report.
A Ugandan farmer and natural resources specialist says irrigation structures for small scale and large scale farming can offset the deadly impact of floods and famine.
Land reform has always been a popular part of political rhetoric for a democratic South Africa, but agrarian transformation has not been realized in the post-apartheid era.The vast majority of agricultural land is still owned by whites. Black landowners tend to have tiny plots in the former homelands.
