Looking to Africa for Ideas About How to Fight Hunger

Looking to Africa for Ideas About How to Fight Hunger

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I'm Alex Villarreal with the VOA Special English Agriculture Report

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's highest hunger rate. The United Nations says thirty percent of the people were undernourished last year.

But a new report says African farmers also have ideas that could help the world fight hunger and poverty.

Danielle Nierenberg from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington spent a year visiting twenty-five countries south of the Sahara.

In Nairobi, Kenya, for example, Ms. Nierenberg found women farmers growing vegetables just outside their doorsteps in the Kibera settlement.

She says the area is crowded, dirty and noisy. But the people are finding ways to make their lives better. The women use old sacks filled with soil.

They cut holes in the sides of the tall bags so air gets to the seeds. The women feed the vegetables to their families and sell their surplus.

They use the money to send their children to school. Last year, an estimated nine hundred twenty-five million people worldwide did not get enough to eat.

Half of all people in the world now live in and around cities. Researchers like Ms. Nierenberg are looking increasingly at creative ideas to feed those who are malnourished.

She said there are a lot of lessons that people in the Western world can learn from Africa.
And what they are doing can be done in other developing countries. Farmers in the developing world lose between twenty and forty percent of their harvest before it ever reaches market.

Asma Lateef from the group Bread for the World says there are many reasons why food gets wasted.

Farmers are without electricity and cold storage. They lack good seeds and fertilizer. They lack good roads.

Ms. Lateef says conditions like these keep small farmers in poverty. Danielle Nierenberg says more attention needs to be paid to protecting harvests.

In Nigeria, village processing centers are helping farmers reduce their losses and earn more money.

The centers process cassava, a root vegetable, into basic food products. In Uganda, the Worldwatch report says some schools are teaching children how to grow local crops.

And in South Africa and Kenya the report praises the breeding of local kinds of livestock.

These animals may produce less milk or meat than other breeds, but they can survive heat and drought conditions.

The report is called "State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet.

For VOA Special English I'm Alex Villarreal