Post Tagged with: "rice"

One step ahead of the Cyclone

You may have had the unfortunate experience of having your seaside vacation interrupted by a thunderstorm, or worse, a hurricane. Imagine if such a storm were responsible for wiping out not just your vacation, but your family’s income and food supply for the coming year. This, while unthinkable for us in the developed world, is a menacing possibility each year for families in Madagascar, an island nation of 22 million in the Indian Ocean. With 3,000 miles (4800 km) of coastline, it’s hard for Madagascar to avoid being a stop on the itinerary for cyclones sweeping through the Southern Indian Ocean.  I recently spent time here with CARE documenting some of their disaster risk reduction programs. A cyclone, as a hurricane is called in the Indian and southern Pacific Oceans, can destroy acres of the rice paddies that produce Madagascar’s staple crop.  But what if farmers could harvest their crop[…]

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Back to the Farm

Get this: 80% of Burkina Faso’s population attempts to make it’s living in subsistence agriculture while only 19% of land is arable.  That makes farming kind of like a guy getting a date in a country where men outnumber women four to one.  Poor soil qualities, fluctuations in rainfall, and topsoil erosion all contribute to the country’s crop production woes.  Recent work is displayed here from the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s agricultural programs in Burkina Faso. MCC, a humanitarian arm of the US State Department, is boosting production and access to markets for small farmers in this West African country, however.  The programs shown here document the organization’s efforts in sustainable agriculture, livestock vaccination, fertilizers, and agro-forestry, as well as ground-breaking, innovative initiatives.  In the Market Information Systems program, agents use cell phone technology to publish regional market prices for a variety of commodities.  Farmers who subscribe to the database can[…]

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