Please join us in supporting farm communities around the world as they work to grow their own food in a lasting way.
Senior editor, Jim Patrico of Progressive Farmer magazine traveled with FRB to Kenya in June. His article, The Hungriest Continent, published in print and online chronicles his trip through Africa and the struggle that agriculture and the continent is facing as the population is predicted to double by 2050. Patrico and a group of FRB volunteers and staff traveled to four of FRB's programs in Kenya: Kitui, Ganze, Intashat, Machakos.
An excerpt of The Hungriest Continent is below. Follow this link to read the full article.
"Kenya. A sign on the one-room store owned by farmer Kahindi Suleiman in an eastern Kenya village reads: "Poverty is not a disability."
Suleiman has known poverty intimately. A few years ago, he was a charcoal man—in Kenyan society, one step above starvation. He cut down trees, burned them in a pit until they were charcoal, bagged it in gunnysacks and hauled it to town to sell for use as cooking fuel.
The backbreaking process barely earned him survival. "I could feed my family only one meal a day," Suleiman says through an interpreter.
Today, the 36-year-old farmer, his two wives and five children eat three meals a day. He owns that store, is a beekeeper, raises both goats and crops for sale, and has enough money to have bought 30 acres of rough land he hopes to farm. He participates in a saving and credit program, and is proud of his new three-room mud house with a metal roof; it replaces a one-room hut of grass and mud."
