The Last Hunger Season

June 4, 2012
In this empathetic and eye-opening account, former Wall Street Journal reporter Thurow (coauthor, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty) focuses on a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya, "a paradoxical region of breathtaking beauty and overwhelming misery." Lacking modern farming equipment and valuable fertilizers, these farmers struggle to feed their families throughout the year and produce enough crops to bring in money to send their children to school, believing that "education was the surest route out of poverty." However, even these humble goals are often too lofty to achieve. Instead, growers must stretch dwindling food supplies across the gap between harvests, a period known as the "wanjala," or hunger season. In chronicling the plight of these farmers, Thurow also discusses the efforts of the One Acre Fund, a relatively new organization founded by Andrew Youn whose aim is to provide farmers with "access to the seeds and soil nutrients and planting advice" that would normally be unavailable to them. By documenting their collaboration, Thurow paints a sobering but ultimately hopeful picture of a continuing food crisis in Africa and some of the things people are doing to mitigate it. B&W photos.

April 15, 2012
Toiling one step ahead of famine: a firsthand chronicle of a year in the life of small farmers in Kenya. As a senior fellow at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, Thurow (co-author, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, 2009) traveled to Kenya at the invitation of the American social enterprise One Acre Fund in order to help often-neglected small farmers gain access to the technology and knowledge that would allow them to avoid the famines that have typically plagued the African regions. Rural Africa, long a "nightmarish landscape of neglect," underutilized and undercultivated, might offer the hope of feeding the burgeoning future population of the world--but only if its resources can be ecologically harnessed and its small farmers trained to use the land wisely, according to the Obama Administration's Feed the Future initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations. Under the auspices of One Acre, Thurow worked with cooperatives in Lutacho, in the same Lugulu Hills of western Kenya made famous by Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. Of the 100 or so farmers in the area (overall, One Acre worked with 50,000 farmers in western Kenya and Rwanda), more than two-thirds were women who had to put aside traditional farming methods and learn the "Obama method," as the One Acre field officers called it, capitalizing on the American president's family ties to the region. As they trusted the new hybrid seeds of maize and learned how to weed, use fertilizer, buy on credit and sell on the commodities market, farmers like Leonida and Rasoa were seeing greater yields and learning how to plan for times of scarcity. Thurow's account is a seasonal diary, moving from the dry season at the New Year through the planting; he recounts the wait for rains and the harvest and the successes and failures of a handful of tenacious family farmers. A business-based approach that redefines the notion of food aid to Africa.

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May 1, 2012
In western Kenya, where farming methods are mostly unchanged since the 1930s, hunger is so prevalent that many people have wanjala, or hunger, as their middle name. But in 2011, a small group of farmers sponsored by the One Acre Fund gathered in a cooperative and adopted new methods of planting and nurturing the soil that have immensely increased their yields. Thurow, world hunger activist and author of Enough (2009), spent a year with four of the farmers as they struggled to change the pattern of starvation in their area. Typically, because of poor soil and inefficient farming methods, long hunger seasons stretch from the time food from the previous harvest in August and September runs out to the time when new crops are harvested. Thurow also examines the broader issues of government corruption, negligent agriculture development, and international food-aid policies that support farming in developed nations at the expense of poor nations. Thurow highlights the small farm cooperative as a promising program to end hunger at a time when U.S. overseas programs are under attack by deficit hawks.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)