Roger Thurow
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, â€œfrom misery to Canaan,â€ the land of milk and honey.,Africaâ€™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 farmersâ€“â€“rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fieldsâ€“â€“is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they donâ€™t have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjalaâ€“â€“the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nineâ€“â€“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 themâ€“â€“Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketiâ€“â€“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 farmersâ€™ 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.
Cultural,Africa,Nonfiction,International Rel...,International Development,Food and Drink,Food,Economics,Eastern Africa,Kenya,Science,Agriculture,Business,Academic,College,Social Movements,Social Justice
The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change