Nourishing the Planet

(From left to right) Danielle with Santiago Medina, Jacinta Mutambe, and Alicia Gonsales Sosa at the farmer's workshop in Maputo, Mozambique. (Photo: Bernard Pollack)

In Maputo, Mozambique I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop organized by Prolinnova, the Spanish NGO Centro de Iniciativas para la Cooperación/Batá, and the National Farmers Union of Mozambique, UNAC, about different agricultural innovations. But the farmers weren’t there to be trained by the NGOs. Instead, they were in Maputo to share their experiences and learn from each other about different innovations each farmer was practicing in her or his community

Energindo Paulo, from Nicassa province, for example, was there to explain how to make pesticidas natural, natural, non-toxic pesticides to protect crops. His ingredients—including leaves from the Neem tree—were displayed on the floor in front of him as he talked about different methods for controlling pests. When Energindo finished his presentation, the group of 50 farmers asked questions about how to apply the pesticide—directly on the leaves—and how long they should wait after applying the pesticide to eat the produce—two or three days.

Throughout the morning, farmers presented other innovations and practices—including how to prevent diseases that affect their crops and fruit trees and how to raise farmed fish.

According to Santiago Medina of Batá, this workshop was the culmination of a series of workshops that Batá/Prolinnova/UNAC held in 2009 to help farmers identify innovations in their communities and then share them with other farmers. They plan to identify 12-14 innovations and practices identified at the workshops for a book which will be translated into three of Mozambique’s languages, allowing these different innovations to spread throughout the country. And the workshops help farmers value—and invest in—their own local knowledge.

Everywhere I travel in Africa, there’s increasing acknowledgement about the importance of nutrition when it comes to treating HIV/AIDS.  Many retroviral and HIV/AIDS drugs don’t work if patients aren’t getting enough vitamins and nutrients in their diets or accumulating enough body fat.

According to Dr. Rosa Costa, regional coordinator of a project on the control of Newcastle disease in Mozambique, many farmers are often too sick to grow crops, but “chickens are easy.”

The International Rural Poultry Center of the Kyeema Foundation and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics are working with farmers—most of them women—to raise chickens on their farms. Because women are often the primary caregivers for family members with HIV/AIDS, they need easy, low-cost sources of both food and income.

Unlike many crops, raising free-range birds can require few outside inputs and very little maintenance from farmers. Birds can forage for insects and eat kitchen scraps, instead of expensive grains. They provide not only meat and eggs for household use and income, but also pest control and manure for fertilizer.