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Loading... The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change (edition 2012)by Roger Thurow
Work InformationThe Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change by Roger Thurow
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. In Kenya, the hunger season is defined as the time between when supplies from last year's harvest run out and the next year's crops are ready to be harvested. Just by its definition, you would think this would be a rare occurrence - maybe something that happens during a disaster. But for many small holder farmers in Kenya, the hunger season happens every year and lasts several months. The Last Hunger Season follows the lives of several families as they navigate what they hope to be their last hunger season. All of these families are hoping to break the vicious cycle of poverty through their participation in the One Acre Fund, an NGO that offers farmers improved seeds, fertilizers, and farming methods, so they can yield a crop that will hopefully last an entire year. It is heartbreaking to read about some of these families whose children go to school with only a cup of tea for breakfast, walk all the way home for lunch to have nothing, and possibly just a cup of tea and some vegetables for dinner. I am completely baffled that we live in a world where we throw away food daily, fly around the world and yet, still have people on this planet who starve to death. Such a fantastic story, that offers some hope, but really will change your view of the world. The message of this book - that hunger can be overcome, that the will is there to prosper and thrive - that is the amazing thing about this year in the lives of four different Kenyan farmer families. The work of One Acre is truly inspiring and the hardships that these families have lived through are heartbreaking. Poverty is a relative thing, but many Americans take for granted the broad safety nets that don't exist for much of the world's poor. Seeing the progress that One Acre has made in alleviating hunger and hardship has made me want to be involved in an endeavor that is working and that gives its participants ownership and satisfaction in being able to care for themselves and to look forward to prosperity. In America, not having any food in the house often means that there is plenty to eat, just not what you are hungry for. But in Kenya, where one is often named for the season of year in which one was born, there are too many children named Wanjala — the hunger season. Even among farmers, hunger and its accompanying problems is common. The Last Hunger Season details one year in the life of 4 farmers involved in One Acre Fund, founded by American Andrew Youn. One Acre Fund seeks to improve farming techniques through education, loans and better seeds. It is not another food aid agency; it seeks to improve the lives of farmers by making them part of the solution. The Last Hunger Season is an eye-opening book. Hunger and the day to day struggle to have enough to eat is something foreign to most of us in the Western world. The idea that farmers go through a hunger season, watching their children become more and more listless and susceptible to disease seems incomprehensible. While I did not always agree with the political assessments of the author, I found the book a great look into the heart of the famine problem in Africa. I am also impressed with One Acre Fund’s commitment to educate and empower the farmers rather than perpetuate the cycle of handouts and need. The featured farmers and their families are very real. I hurt during their losses and rejoiced with them in their victories. The book puts a face and a heart on the problems seen in 30 second commercial clips. These farmers are not so different from you and me — they want more for their children. They are committed to hard work, persistence and perseverance. And they get on their knees, raise their hands and praise God for what He has done, what He’s doing and what He will do. I recommend The Last Hunger Season to anyone who wants an accurate look at the plight of farmers in the developing world and a wonderful project that can be the solution to the problem. Recommended. (I received The Last Hunger Season from B&B Media in exchange for a review. The opinions expressed are mine alone.) no reviews | add a review
At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, "from misery to Canaan," the land of milk and honey. Africa's smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers--rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields--is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don't have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala--the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine--abides. But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them--Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi--to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger. The daily dramas of the farmers' lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.196762Social sciences Economics Production Agricultural products Food supply AfricaLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Thurow gives the details, being careful to point out the prices of everything. This emphasizes the farmers' poverty; relatively small amounts of money are life-changing. One Acre comes across as an amazing program. It has any number of initiatives, but the main one is organizing groups of farmers, loaning them maize seeds and fertilizer, and teaching them how to plant them most efficiently (when to plant, how to use the fertilizer and place the seeds, etc.).
Thurow himself is invisible. Mostly this works to make the narrative seem more immediate and less intermediated. But sometimes you can't help but feel that the conversations he is reporting are for his benefit, and that the farmers might be a little less perfect idealists in reality. It is disappointing that he never gives any pushback. He discusses the funding of international aid programs in Washington, DC, as if their importance is self-evident—but in fact the programs are largely disconnected from the farmers he is following. (After this, One Acre did get a government grant.) He accepts without question the farmers' critique of the Kenyan government for not propping up maize prices during their harvest—even though there was an ongoing hunger crisis in Kenya, and just a few weeks earlier the same farmers were struggling to feed themselves because prices were too high!
Thurow also seems to believe that agricultural development is the way out of the poverty trap for these communities, instead of, e.g., moving to cities where they can be more productive. While the progress made is inspirational, one can't help but wonder how far it can go; doubling the yield on a family's half-acre plot of land is huge, but it isn't even close to enough for a family with seventeen children. Obviously, development is a hard problem, but these farmers show how it can be done, with their resilience, determination, hard work, initiative, and strong investments in education. At least implicitly, Thurow clearly understands that these qualities are more important than government or NGO programs. But it all works together, and the One Acre Fund makes a huge difference. ( )