Tag: Ethiopia

Regenerative Agriculture to Mitigate Hunger: Thurow’s Latest Book

Book Review:    Roger Thurow’s Against the Grain:  How Farmers Around the Globe are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Health the Planet (2024, Publisher:  Agate Surrey)

American journalist, Roger Thurow, has written consistently about global hunger and food issues for many years.  In his latest globe-spanning book he highlights the work of farmers who are “going against the grain” by adopting regenerative agriculture practices.  These methods prioritize soil health, biodiversity, and natural processes, leading to more resilient and productive farms. Thurow introduces readers to farmers in diverse regions, from the American Midwest to Africa and India, who are successfully implementing these practices and achieving remarkable results.

Thurow visits a dozen countries in different continents telling the story of local responses to the upward pressures of world population growth and the strains on global food chains.  He highlights the UN World Food Programme, the NGO World Vision, the International Livestock Research Institute, and others.

Against the Grain’s central theme revolves around the idea that industrial agriculture, with its reliance on monoculture, chemical inputs, and intensive farming methods, has come at a significant cost to both the environment and human health.  Thurow argues that this common approach is unsustainable and undermines the long-term viability of food production.

One of the book’s strengths is its ability to explain the connections between individual farming practices and global concerns such as climate change, food security, and public health. Thurow demonstrates how sustainable agriculture can play a crucial role in mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He emphasizes the importance of diverse, nutrient-rich diets in combating malnutrition and promoting public health.  He interviews dozens of farmers, some of whom farmers incurred risks to change their  long-term practices to work with nature and terrace their land to catch more rainwater and prevent soil runoff; to plant a diverse range of vegetables that would balance the nutrients in the soil; to replaced commercial fertilizers with organic matter from their own farms;  to plant more trees and drought-resistant grains; and then shared their success with neighbors and communities.

Thurow spends time with farmers in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley who are implementing practices like terracing and agroforestry to restore degraded land and improve their livelihoods.  He highlights the ongoing work of aid organizations like the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in promoting sustainable agriculture and empowering local communities.

In Uganda, he visits farmers who are diversifying their crops, integrating livestock, and using cover crops to improve soil health and increase resilience to drought.

He explores efforts to combat land degradation and improve food security in Ethiopia, where farmers are adopting techniques like intercropping and water harvesting to enhance productivity in the face of challenging environmental conditions.  He travels to India’s Indo-Gangetic Plain, where he meets Indian farmers who are revitalizing their soil and increasing yields through practices like no-till farming and crop rotation. He also examines the challenges faced by Indian farmers, including water scarcity and climate change.

When visiting Guatemala’s Highlands, Thurow describes the efforts of smallholder farmers to preserve traditional maize varieties and promote sustainable farming practices in the face of pressures from industrial agriculture.

Against the Grain offers a valuable contribution to the conversation about the future of food and farming. It provides a hopeful vision of a more sustainable and equitable food system, while also acknowledging the challenges that lie ahead. Thurow’s engaging writing style and his passion for the subject matter make “Against the Grain” an informative and thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the intersection of food, agriculture, and the environment.

Note:  Some NGOs specialize in promoting this type of agriculture, including Trees for the Future. Thurow serves on the advisory committee for Action Against Hunger, US.

A related book review about Regenerative Agriculture is available at another non-profit’s (Well Being International’s) site:  https://wellbeingintl.org/resources/newsletter-archive/wellbeingnews/wellbeing-news-vol-6-11/  .

The Razor’s Edge: Embezzlement, Corruption and Development in Ethiopia, a Novel (2022)

For anyone interested in learning what development work overseas entails and what work is like, there may be no better introduction than Robert Gurevich’s novel, The Razor’s Edge.  Thinly modeled on his own experiences in Africa, with his protagonist, writing in the first person, caught between the US Government’s Agency for International Development (USAID) and non-governmental organization work, primarily in basic education for kids.  The book follows the adventures of a westerner hired to lead an NGO’s (KAP) education program of schools, collaborating with parent-teacher associations, and building on models that have worked.

One reviewer on Amazon agrees:  “Any development worker contemplating taking a senior foreign posting, especially with an NGO, on a government-funded education project could benefit from reading this book.” The 2002 story is an easy read at 298 pages, with the subtitle “Embezzlement, Corruption and Development in Ethiopia, a Novel”. 

He starts the book as the new project director of a USAID-overseen project supporting 2,500 primary schools in Ethiopia.  The journey of the protagonist has formed experiences at each stage of his project work, from being proposed to USAID through to meeting staff, implementation, accounting, responding to evaluations of his program, and controversies that have arisen over the years which include observing staff turnover and allegations of fraud.  The author repeatedly debates how to interact with USAID – the main funder — regarding his choices, presentations, and reporting USAID is likely to accept or reject.  Though budgets are not discussed, key realities of development programs are milestones, timelines, and scaling.

Hunger and malnutrition enter the plot when there is a poor harvest, to which the NGO and their donors respond with school feeding. School feeding has been a large part of aid programming for decades, particularly as an incentive for girls to attend school.  Late in the book, Ethiopia suffers a drought, for which USAID provides new resources to KAP (“a large emergency grant”) to support school feeding programs to encourage children to continue attending school, help them have the strength to travel to school and nutrition to help pay attention and learn in the classroom. The protagonist observes USAID efficiently sought to “utilize an already existing project for addressing this emergency quickly.

In the telling, hot, cooked meals (i.e., “wet food”) were provided. “With wet food, we know for sure that the food is consumed by the child and not taken by an older family member at home.  By eating the meal at school , this makes all the children continue to attend.”

Other insights about the challenges of aid work appear in each chapter, such as “the major problem has been the use of cash payments to schools, along with lax scrutiny.  I am recommending each beneficiary school be required to open an account with the nearest bank, credit union… into which project funds can be deposited.”

Two choices families face are:  “For children to continue their schooling beyond the four grades offered in the village school, they would need to move to a town with a primary school offering eight grades, and, later, a secondary school.  These children would need to live with someone.” or “Parents need the labor of children during certain times of year, keeping them out of school at these times. But when the children fall behind their classmates, they become embarrassed and drop out.”

The author is an anthropologist, specializing in education, working in consultancies for USAID and the Peace Corps, Chairman and Member of the Board of Directors for the USAID-funded Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program. Among other technical achievements, in 2015 he evaluated the USG’s education portfolio in Yemen.

In his way, Gurevich pays homage to the 1944 novel of the same name by Somerset Maugham where the protagonist, also, travels far and wide seeking to discover transcendent liberation from human suffering.  It took its title from the ancient Upanishads verse “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus, the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

https://www.amazon.com/Razors-Edge-Embezzlement-Corruption-Development/dp/1950444295

“Love and Liberation” Captures Voices of Local Aid Workers in Famine Zone

Lauren Carruth’s important 2021 book, Love and Liberation – Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia’s Somali Region (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) fills a gap in the literature about aid programs by listening to the perspectives of those personnel delivering aid on the front-lines who are not expatriates, but locals, who, by the way, represent the majority of staff for all aid agencies everywhere.  In doing so she discusses alternate ways of understanding crises, what “localization” actually means, inequalities in local labor hierarchies.

Carruth, a Professor at American University in Washington, DC, explores the reasons why the eastern region of Ethiopia is repeatedly beset by food crises that have compelled substantial amounts of food and health assistance by the World Food Programme, Save the Children, UNICEF and other aid organizations for decades.  This cyclical nature of the relief industry plays out in other countries as well.  An anthropologist, Dr. Carruth suggests a typology for places and peoples who suffer repeat or perpetual food insecurity.

The author’s interviews cover not only the conditions driving food insecurity, but the emotional lives of the local aid workers who are passionate about their work and emotional about the problems they see firsthand.  As she says “Drivers, logistics managers, translators, data collectors, researchers and field monitors and the like were all necessary to aid operations because, essentially, they make projects happen.”   She compares the expectations and experiences of locals working with the UN, with Non-governmental Organizations, and the Ethiopian government.  The book returns often to this theme:  “the global humanitarian industry depends on ample supplies of cheap, temporary, flexible and expendable labor from the localities where it intervenes — ironically to proffer a narrative of improving the lives of locals.”  She gives voices to the 95% of humanitarian personnel who are from the countries and communities in crisis.

Dr. Carruth’s focus is the Somali region in the northeast of Ethiopia, not the also-disaster-prone central and northern regions of Ethiopia or the recent warzone in Tigray.  The northeast region, past Jijiga is arid lowlands where many populations are pastoral herders, moving around, posing challenges for aid agencies to reach.  Drivers of conflict, the author explains, include both drought and inter-communal conflict.  The research for this book occurred during a confluence of these hazards:  “By July 2018, as I was conducting research for this book, there were over one million persons internally displaced in eastern Ethiopia, newly settled into makeshift camps and informal settlements near Jijiga and Dire Dawa and all along the Oromia-Somali regional boundaries.”

An example of the type of work the book draws on are mobile health and nutrition teams.  “Mobile teams have been active in the [East Ethiopian] Somali Region since 2005 during a measles and polio outbreak.  Most mobile teams are designed to provide vaccinations, a few essential medications, water treatment equipment referrals to higher medical facilities, supplies of ready-to-eat fortified BP-5 biscuits and therapeutic Plumpy’Nut peanut paste…  Typically communities qualify for mobile team visits based on local rates of acute malnutrition in children under five years or reported outbreaks of infectious disease in the local population… but ..most humanitarian relief targeted the lives and health of young children and their mothers and not the entire community.”

While describing the “affable characters” whom the author finds in the local humanitarian outreach, Dr. Carruth also documents the reciprocal exchange networks  by which the population copes, including trade over long distances.  For instance:

  •        “The decentralization of relief work with its focus on training and hiring ever more local staff and deploying them throughout the region — often on mobile dynamic projects — requires hospitality on the part of hosting family members, friends and recipient communities.  Hospitality is therefore necessary to accomplish the logistics and travel humanitarian interventions require.”
  •    Local staff are compensated in a range of ways.  For instance, “Food for work, training workshops in midwifery and similar interventions organized through governmental and UN relief programs are almost free gifts and …humanitarian handouts.”

Carruth does an admirable job describing the tensions between short-term relief (band aids) and longer-term systemic problems.  So many locals in Ethiopia have been saturated with surveys by NGOs who also promise assistance that doesn’t come.

She describes how local aid workers who are indispensable feel, nevertheless, that they are invisible. “The humanitarian industry continues to rely on the willingness of locals to accept temporary, precarious and flexible contracts, informal labor arrangements and small salaries and per diems [reimbursements] for less money than either Amharic-speaking Ethiopians or expatriates occasionally flying into the Somali [eastern] Region.  The informality of the aid work so often performed by locals and the popularity of tropes about the heroic local aid worker also leave unquestioned the consideration in which their labor takes place, and leave unquestioned the fact that it is often performed in unacceptable conditions with no benefits and no legal rights or recourse for workers’ emotional well-being, abuse, exploitation or injury.”

At 169 pages this book is readable, timely and relevant to anyone interested in how actual humanitarian work unfolds, telling a very neglected part of the story.

To follow the author’s research, see:  https://laurencarruth.com/

For further information about food insecurity in eastern Ethiopia, see:

https://fews.net/east-africa/ethiopia

https://unsdg.un.org/latest/stories/over-3-million-people-impacted-worst-drought-40-years-ethiopias-somali-region

 

reviewed by Steven Hansch, WHES board