Agriculture is the backbone of Tanzania’s life and economy. Three quarters of her people are small-scale, peasant farmers. Earning a living is tough. Soils are exhausted; water is scarce. Improved seed is an inaccessible luxury. Concrete policies that empower small-scale, rural farmers–particularly women, who produce most of Tanzania’s food–need to be boldly implemented. GPM contributor Josephat Mwanzi reports from Dar es Salaam, in the wake of a forum on African agriculture.
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Small farmers in the hills of Honduras are improving their lives through seed saving and on-farm experimentation. Jen Moore reports.
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Afghanistan produces ninety percent of the world’s heroin. The illegal drug accounts for about half the country’s gross domestic product. The Canadian and U.S. governments, along with major media, say the Taliban controls this drug trade. The reality is quite different, as investigative journalist Reese Erlich reports from Jalalabad, near the Pakistan border.
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Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has produced wine for over four thousand years. That winemaking tradition continues today, with Lebanon boasting some world-class reds. But wine making isn’t easy in Lebanon. Vintners have had to deal with fundamentalists, civil war, and invading armies. The struggle has been worth it. Reese Erlich reports from the Bekaa Valley.
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Southern Lebanese farmers are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, their land has been a battleground and Israeli cluster bombs continue to pollute their fields. On the other hand, they’ve been abandoned by Lebanon’s political elite – many of them merchants – who prefer to see Lebanon import its food. A guy named Rami is helping them out.
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By its very nature, water can only be successfully managed by consensus. It flows from one place to the next, often in a meandering way, blind to human demands and arbitrary boundaries. Conflicts often arise, smart solutions typically the exception, rather than the rule. Nowhere are water issues more a propos than in the landlocked South American nation of Bolivia.
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Here’s another dispatch from Victoria Fenner, who spent an action and learning-filled three weeks in Central America earlier in the year. It’s hard to visit Central America and not explore the world of coffee, so here we go.
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Of all the conflicts in Latin America, none was more brutal or costly in human lives than the forty-year civil war in Guatemala. Two hundred thousand people died, most of them impoverished peasants of Mayan ancestry. Today, former rebels are presenting their perspective of the struggle–to tourists.
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The slow-food movement has reached dizzying heights on the sun-baked altiplano of Bolivia, in the Andean highlands. Here, small-scale producers are making the most of scarce water supplies, ample sun, a few inexpensive materials and local expertise to eke out a living in some of the highest elevation farmland in the world.
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GPM producer Victoria Fenner has recently returned from a trip to Central America. In Honduras, she spent a few days on the side of a big mountain, gazing down on clouds soaked with rain. On the bottom of Panacam’s slopes farming communities depend on her fresh waters and are trying to keep them clean. Here’s Victoria’s story.
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An Interview with 1989 Right Livelihood Award winner Melaku Worede.
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