Summer of Sisterhood: Q&A with Roger Thurow on his book, "The Last Hunger Season"

We caught up with Roger Thurow last month at the Frontiers in Development conference where he moderated our panel about Story Telling and took the opportunity to ask him about his recent book The Last Hunger Season, particularly the links to women and women's health that he found while traveling to write it.

1. Was there a specific moment, event, or time in your life that inspired you to focus your attention on the issue of food security?

 
It was during the Ethiopian famine of 2003 when I realized that hunger in the 21^st century isn’t a story I can just walk away from.  Food security, for individuals and for the entire world, was an issue that seized me like no other in my two decades of foreign corresponding.  An aid worker at the World Food Program told me on my first day in Addis Ababa: “Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger becomes a disease of the soul.  You see that nobody should have to die of hunger.”  He was absolutely right.  The next day we entered a warren of emergency feeding tents filled with starving children.  What I saw looking into their eyes truly opened my eyes – and grabbed my soul – like nothing I had witnessed before as a journalist.  I knew I couldn’t simply move on to the next story.  I had to stay and concentrate on this one: no one should be dying of hunger in the 21^st century.
 
2. How significant of a role do women farmers play in your book?
 
Women farmers play the leading roles in The Last Hunger Season.  Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike and Zipporah Biketi are the main characters.  The narrative follows their daily decisions – how much of the harvest they keep for their family, how much they sell for their children’s education, how they manage resources to combat malnourishment during the hunger season, how they assert their voices in their families and societies -- and the impacts of those actions throughout the year.  Women are the majority of smallholder farmers in Africa and they will be the farmers who conquer the hunger season and lift Africa’s economy.  The book, at its essence, is about empowered women and courageous mothers.
 
3. What particular challenges did the women face and how did that set them apart from the male farmers?
 
Since women do most of the farming of staple crops – the food for everyday consumption -- they bear the responsibility for the nutritional welfare of their families.  When they fail to grow enough food to feed their families throughout the year, they feel that they are failing on two fronts: as farmers and as mothers.  As Leonida says, their goal as farmers is to “go from misery to Canaan,” the Biblical land of milk and honey.  From these farmers I learned that the deepest form of misery is to be a mother unable to stop the crying of a hungry child.  The first time I met Zipporah, she told me, “When you, as a parent, see your child not eating enough to be satisfied, you are hurt, but you are not in a position to control the situation.” Their quest to gain control, to conquer the hunger season, to end the malnutrition of their children, is at the heart of The Last Hunger Season.
 
4. Your book comes out at a time when the issue of food security is finally making it onto policy-makers' agendas. What policy changes do you think would make the greatest impact?
 
Policies that will give these smallholder farmers, these women farmers, the ability to “control the situation,” as Zipporah says, to improve the productivity of their farms, to robustly thrive instead of merely survive.  To do this, a top policy priority must be to reverse the neglect of agricultural development that we have seen over the past couple of decades.  And then to focus those agricultural development efforts on creating the conditions so these smallholder farmers can be as productive as possible.  This means increasing research on technology that will benefit these smallholders.  It means increasing access to seeds and soil nutrients and farming advice and the micro-financing to pay for it all.  It means improving storage facilities and building efficient markets and focusing on rural infrastructure so these farmers can reap the best prices for their crops.  These are long-term solutions, and they must be pursued in concert with the delivery of emergency food aid in times of crisis.  For food aid won’t prevent the next hunger crisis, only agricultural development will. We see these new policies emerging in Africa – many governments are making agricultural development their top spending priority.  And we see these policies gathering prominence in the developed world; President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative, which has the smallholder farmer at its core, is an example of American leadership on ending hunger through agricultural development.

It is important for us in the richer precincts of the planet to realize that agricultural development is vital for all of us as we face the supreme challenge of nearly doubling global food production by 2050 to meet the demand of a population growing in size and prosperity.  The smallholder farmers of Africa, long neglected by policymakers, are now indispensable if we are to meet this challenge.  If they succeed, so might we all.

 
 
5. How do you think improved maternal health would benefit women farmers like those in your book?
 
Improved maternal health will combat the ever-present scourge of malnutrition on several fronts.  Healthier mothers will give their children a stronger start in life.  And they themselves will be stronger farmers, better able to improve their work in the fields and thus increase their harvests.  With improved maternal health would also come the vital education that has long been absent in rural areas: how to select crops to achieve nutritional variety and how to prepare this food to maximize nutritional value.  Improved maternal health is key to banishing the hunger season forever.

About The Last Hunger Season:

The Last Hunger Season is a collection of stories compiled by author, Roger Thurow, as he followed and recorded the lives of rural African farmers over the course of a year. Small, rural farmers living in Africa comprise over two-thirds of the population, and yet are thoroughly deprived of irrigation systems, revolutionized equipment, or fertilizer advancements that have been made throughout the world, along with safeguards such as capital, credit, or insurance. Thurow gives readers a clear, authentic portrait of farmers who combat hunger, food production obstacles, land ownership issues, corruption, as well as foreign aid and investments in their land. Not only are these farmers at risk, but the rest of Africa, and the increasingly hungry world.