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 neighbours 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.
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