Motley Moose – Archive

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

The story of Kasinthula Cane Growers Limited (KCGL), Malawi’s second biggest sugar farmer cooperative with 282 farmers, is just one of many examples of innovative business models made available to farmers, entrepreneurs, and NGOs by Winrock International. Emphasizing the use of environmentally sustainable production methods, Winrock collects examples of innovative Community Food Enterprises from around the world. 

The partnership between KCGL and the Shire Valley Cane Growers Trust is just one example of Winrock’s featured innovations. The two organizations, with support from the government, partnered in 1997 to become a sugarcane farmer cooperative. Despite perpetual drought, and flooding when there is rain, sugar is Malawi’s third largest export. The Trust owns ninety-five percent of the corporation and Illove, one of the largest sugar cane producers in the world, owns the remaining five percent. The Trust leases 755 hectares of sugarcane land that KCGL maintains, guaranteeing farmers—about one-third of whom are women—nearly 3 hectares of land for 25 years. The farmers produce non-organic, fair-trade certified sugar, and the profits are divided equally among the members of the cooperative. All of the sugar produced by the farmers is sold internationally by Illove, connecting the farmers and the cooperative to the global market.

KCGL, in cooperation with Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, have also developed a plan to direct fair trade premiums towards community investments, company infrastructure and building materials for the farmers. They have built a well for the community, brought electricity to small villages, and are opening their medical clinic to the community for HIV/AIDS education and treatment.  

As part of a collective, the farmers are given a voice in an industry where they otherwise might not be competitive. In addition to increased incomes through fair-trade certification and access to the world market, the farmers who are members of KCGL receive the support and stability they need to lift their families out of poverty.

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Sylvia Banda started Sylva Professional Catering Services Limited in 1986, even though just 30 years ago women weren’t allowed to own businesses-or even eligible for loans-in Zambia. She began her business by serving people food she cooked and brought from home on what she calls, a “standing buffet,” because she didn’t have enough money for tables and chairs.

Not having furniture didn’t stop Sylvia’s business from taking off; she made almost a hundred dollars after a few days. And with her husband listed as the proprietor of her business because land rights are limited if not inaccessible to women in Zambia, Sylvia was able to grow her small “standing buffet” into three subsidiary businesses.

Sylva Professional Catering Services Limited is dedicated to creating, selling and serving nutritious foods, made from indigenous and traditional products that are purchased from local farmers and merchants. Sylvia provides work for 73 people and has developed partnerships with local development organizations, using her financial and popular success to become a proponent of farmer and employee training. She calls it “economic emancipation.”  

Sylvia’s success has benefited not just her own family, but the wider community as well. And Winrock International, an organization that collects examples of projects focused on sustainable food, improving livelihoods and preserving local food traditions, hopes to extend her positive impact even further still by making her case study available as a resource and model for potential entrepreneurs-and for policy makers and NGOs who support potential entrepreneurs-around the world.

For more information about Sylvia’s work and other projects that are focusing on sustainable food, improving livelihoods and preserving local food traditions, see Winrock International’s site on Community Food Enterprises.

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa is most well known as the scene of massive protests and violence under Apartheid. Today, it is place of contradictions. While many of South Africa’s wealthiest citizens live there, it’s also a community plagued by poverty. Many of the residents live in shacks with tin roofs and don’t have running water or electricity. But like the residents of other cities in Africa, including Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi (See Vertical Farms: Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera and Farming on the Urban Fringe), the residents of Soweto are growing foods, including cabbage, kale, spinach, and other vegetables in their yards.

While Johannesburg doesn’t have an official policy supporting urban agriculture, the government in Cape Town, South Africa has invested $5 million rand ($671,670 USD) to help the city’s poorest residents grow vegetables and fruits and raise livestock.

Stay tuned for more on urban agriculture as I travel to other cities in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is the final in a four-part series about my visit to Stacia and Kristof Nordin’s permaculture project in Lilongwe, Malawi. Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Travel anywhere in Malawi and you’ll see people sweeping-the sidewalks, the floors of their houses, and the bare dirt outside their homes. And while the sweeping makes everything look tidy, it’s also one of the major causes of damage to soils in the country. Because sweeping compacts soils, leaving it without any organic matter, erosion is widespread and the soil has very little nutrients. As a result, crops-especially corn-in Malawi rely heavily on the use of artificial fertilizers.

Kristof and Stacia Nordin have been working in Malawi to help educate farmers that “tidy” yards and gardens aren’t necessarily better for producing food or the environment. Stacia works for the German-base NGO GTZ, while Kristof runs the farm and is a community facilitator. Their home is used as a demonstration plot for permaculture methods that incorporate composting, water harvesting, intercropping and other methods that help build organic matter in soils, conserve water, and protect agricultural diversity.

“Design,” says Kristof, “is key in permaculture,” meaning that everything from the garden beds to the edible fish pond to the composting toilet have an important role on their property.  And while their neighbors have been skeptical of the Nordins’ unswept yard, they’re impressed by the quantity-and diversity-of food grown by the family. More than 200 indigenous fruits and vegetables are grown on the land, providing a year round supply of food to the Nordins and their neighbors.

In addition, they’re training the 26 tenants who rent houses on the property to practice permaculture techniques around their homes and have built an edible playground, where children can play and learn about different indigenous fruits.  More importantly, the Nordins are showing that by not sweeping, people can get more out of the land than just maize.

Such practices will become even more important as drought, flooding, other effects of climate change continue to become more evident in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

For more about permaculture, check out Chapter 6, “From Agriculture to Permaculture” in State of the World 2010, which was released today.

Crossposted from Nourishing the Planet.

I’ve had the opportunity to try some traditional-and tasty-local foods while I’ve been traveling in Africa, including amaranth, breadfruit, matooke (mashed banana), posho (maize flour), groundnut sauce, spider weed, sukuma wiki (a leafy green), and a whole lot of other vegetables and fruits with names that I can neither remember nor pronounce.

One thing I haven’t tried yet is found all over Africa and, in addition to being a food source, it is also considered a pest-grasshoppers. As I was walking through a market in Kampala, Uganda I noticed women “shelling” what I thought were beans, but upon closer inspection the baskets sitting between their legs were full of wriggling grasshoppers. As they sat, chatting with one another and the curious American, they were de-winging the insects so that they could be either sold “raw” or fried for customers.

Despite the yuck factor many of you reading this might have for eating insects, grasshoppers, crickets, termites, and other “bugs” can be a nutritious source of protein, vitamins, minerals,

and other nutrients. According to the results from a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization workshop in 2008, caterpillars are an important source of food for many people in Central Africa, providing not only protein, but also potassium and iron.

Collecting and selling insects can also be an important source of income, especially for women in Africa. And as climate change increases the prevalence of certain insects, they become an even more important source of food in the future.

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

While touring Lilongwe, Malawi, we met Kambuku (which means “leopard” in Chichewa), who was soundly sleeping in his 2,500 sq meter backyard of fenced green landscape. He was rescued by the Lilongwe Wildlife Centre after poachers shattered his knee in Nyika National Park (making it impossible for him to ever return to the wild.) As we toured the facility nearly every animal we saw – from baboons to alligators – had a similar Cinderella story of overcoming insurmountable odds to survive and, in most cases, return back to the wild.

As we toured the animal rescue, rehabilitation and education facility, it was clear that the staff felt a deep commitment to their cause. The organization funded, in part, by UK-based retailer The Body Shop abides by the philosophy that all animals have the right to live in the wild and that teaching conservation is key to protecting the rights of wildlife.

Not only do they provide sanctuary space for rescued, confiscated, orphaned and injured wild animals of Malawi, but the Center is one of the leading organizations in Malawi pushing lawmakers to enforce and enact legislation in support of wildlife conservation and environmental protection. They also develop local partnerships and training programs with the farmers and communities surrounding national parks. The struggle between protecting wildlife and agriculture is becoming especially evident as drought, conflict, and hunger continue to affect sub-Saharan Africa.  I’ll be visiting other projects, including Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO), in Zambia that are helping educate-and increase economic opportunities-for farmers living inside and near conservation areas.

Should you feel inspired to help the Center, you can donate directly by clicking here. Also, for a more hands-on experience, they are actively looking for volunteers on the ground to help.

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Check out this video of Kristof Nordin discussing how growing indigenous vegetables benefits farmers in Malawi:

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Over the last few years, China, India, and the Middle East have invested heavily in African land, spurred on by the global food and economic crises-as well as the threats of climate change, population growth, and water scarcity. By controlling agricultural land in Kenya, Ethiopia, and elsewhere on the continent, these nations hope to secure future food supplies for their populations, even as sub-Saharan Africa faces increasing hunger. At least 23 million people are currently at risk for starvation in the Horn of Africa. And this increasing foreign investment in African land has largely remained under the global radar. In addition, the push for alternative energy sources is driving investors to purchase land for energy crops, like corn and sugar cane, which can be used to produce biofuels instead of food.

Some experts argue that “land grabbing” or the investment in foreign soil is progress for agriculture, by bringing development and big agriculture to impoverished countries through the introduction of new technologies and jobs. But, as the article, The Great Land Grab, co-authored by Nourishing the Planet Advisory Group member Anuradha Mittal, explains, “corporate agribusiness has been known to establish itself in developing countries with the effect of either driving independent farmers off their land or metabolizing farm operation so that farmers become a class of workers within the plantation.”

Land grabs can come at a great cost to local farmers and communities. In Pakistan, for example, the United Arab Emirates purchased 324,000 hectares of land in the Punjab province. According to a local farmer’s movement, this purchase will displace an estimated 25,000 villagers in the province, where 94 percent of the people are subsistence farmers only utilizing about 2 hectares of land each. Because of these “land grabs,”not only are farmers removed from land, but the local economy also suffers.  Many hunger-stricken countries, such as Sudan and Kenya, will have to import foods that were once grown locally.

Check out a video from our visit to Kristof and Stacia Nordin’s Permaculture project outside Lilongwe, Malawi:

Crossposted from www.BorderJumpers.org.

We’ve taken some long bus rides in Africa. We spent 8 bumpy hours on a bus from Nairobi to Arusha; another 8 from Arusha to Dar Es Salaam. The longest so far, though, has been between Kigali, Rwanda and Kampala, Uganda. I am usually looking out the window, admiring the crops growing by the side of the road, desperately trying not to think about how I have to pee, and trying not to panic about how fast our bus driver is maneuvering between other buses, cattle, and street vendors hawking roasted corn, bananas, and pineapples on the side of the road. Bernie, on the other hand, has a different strategy for coping–sleep.

During that 12 hour bus ride, here are the things he slept through: a commercial bus going 80 miles an hour on a one lane highway (even getting stopped for a speeding ticket, which is tough to accomplish on these roads), crying babies (including the seat next to us), the driver flirting via text message on his cell phone and turning backwards (sometimes for as long as ten seconds) to make conversation with the bus company staffer, blasting American hip-hop accompanied by pirated music videos on the television screen, and so much more…

I love him, but the man can sleep through anything..