Malian rice farmer Moussa Ag Demba visited an Iowa organic farm last week. Photo: Sarah Peck / Oxfam America

I admit it: I’ve taken rice for granted. I’ve let it languish, starchy and plain, in neglected cardboard take-out containers. I’ve pushed it to the side of my plate in order to get to the good stuff.

But over the last few days, I’ve come to see this humble grain in a whole new light.

It all started during lunch last Friday at a brick-walled Vietnamese restaurant on the outskirts of Des Moines. With me were Minh Le, Oxfam America country representative in Vietnam; assorted staffers and translators; Moussa Ag Demba, a farmer from Douékiré, Mali; and Duddeda Sugunavva, a farmer from Andhra Pradesh, India.

Oxfam America, Africare, and WWF-International had invited these farmers to the US—along with a Vietnamese farmer, Le Ngoc Thach—to talk about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). This innovative approach to growing rice produces higher yields using less water and fewer pesticides. All three farmers led their communities in introducing SRI, and were here to share their success stories with everyone from US government officials to agriculture experts at the World Food Prize Symposium.

But that day at the restaurant, the farmers were hungry. And they craved something more familiar than the meat-and-potatoes Iowa cuisine.

Then rice arrived, white and gleaming, each serving molded into a perfect dome.

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Le Ngoc Thach (right) checks a rice field with a farmer from his cooperative in Dai Nghia, Vietnam. Photo by Chau Doan/Oxfam America.

Last month I visited rice farming areas in Cambodia and Vietnam and looked at how growers are using the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) to cut their costs and increase their yields. In addition to learning about SRI myself and hearing directly from farmers, I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the very strong and visionary leaders who are working every day to help people in their communities improve their lives.

One of them is Le Ngoc Thach, and you can read about him in my colleague Soleak Seang’s article here. When Thach became the leader of the growers’ cooperative in his village in Vietnam, he looked for innovative ways to fight poverty. He was certain SRI would help, but how do you convince farmers who have always grown rice the same way to suddenly change? It’s risky. Read the rest of this entry »

Sap Lan grows rice in her village Lalai, in Ratanakiri, Cambodia. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

In Cambodia’s northern-most province of Ratanakiri, Sap Lan shows visitors her rice field. The indigenous Kavet woman says that normally by this time of September the plants are up to her waist. Late rainfall this year means her rice plants barely reach her ankle. She is counting on harvesting wild fruits and vegetables from the surrounding forest for food and to earn money to buy rice.

Indigenous people in this province like Sap Lan depend heavily on nature, especially rain and forest resources.  Their community forest is thick with huge, magnificent trees, some as wide as five people joining hands in a circle. They soar into the sky. It is dark in the late afternoon in the woods, and when you break out into the rich light of the rice field, the bright green shocks your eyes.

There are 11 people in 29-year-old Lap’s extended family; all living in one small house near their 2.5-acre rice field. Last year they made up for a dry growing season and a shortfall in rice production by gathering the fruit from samrong trees. In some places people can pay $10 for a kilo of samrong fruit. The family earned enough to buy a motorcycle and fix up their house.

The struggle for survival here may become even more challenging: The family is hearing that a mining company is exploring for minerals in the area and that the company has a 20,500-acre concession from the government, granted without consultation or permission from the local people in the village of Lalai, on the edge of a large stream flowing into the Se San river, a tributary of the mighty Mekong.

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Vuong Hoang Kim was one of the first farmers in her commune to commit to growing SRI rice--and she is pleased with the results. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

In the hills and river valleys north and east of Hanoi, rice farming is on my mind. But I am also thinking about my uncle Henry, who served as a corpsman (medic) in the US Marines here in Vietnam, where he was badly wounded.

“It’s a beautiful country,” he once told me. He would know, as his recon unit spent a lot of time (sometimes two weeks straight) out in the countryside.  And I am here to say that he was right.

I am much farther north (about 250 kilometers north and west of Hanoi) than Henry ever was.  I spent the last two days talking with farmers learning a different way to grow rice, Vietnam’s most important food crop. They call it SRI: System of Rice Intensification. The local office of the Plant Protection Sub Department, with help from Oxfam, is running farmer field schools, going commune by commune to teach techniques that help farmers increase yields, reduce diseases and pest infestations (and the need for pesticides), while using fewer seeds, less water and labor.  The farmers I spoke with said they are making more money on the paddy land with the right soil that allows them to grow SRI rice.

In Dae Phac commune, Vuong Hoang Kim, a 28-year-old mother of two, said SRI is helping her family improve their standard of living. “We can buy things, and pay for my [eight-year-old] son’s education expenses, like books and clothes,” she told me outside her modest but comfortable home on a hillside overlooking the green rice fields, where her plants are gracefully arched with the weight of  maturing grains of rice. “We can also invest in different types of fertilizer for our next crop.”

This province, called Yen Bai, is one of the poorest in the country. The poverty rate is something like 20 percent, so many farmers are enthusiastic about the potential benefits of SRI.

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None of us can live without water. But for many people around the world, the water they depend on is far away and it isn’t always safe for drinking. March 22 marks World Water Day. Here’s a look at some of the hardship more than one billion people endure:

Loko Dadacha. Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

After two weeks away from the office on a personal trip to Japan, I came back today to find hundreds of emails piled up in my inbox. But once I plowed my way through the spam and the endless Outlook meeting invitations, I discovered something really exciting: a link to Oxfam’s new short video about how climate change affects poor people in countries like El Salvador, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and the US.

 This video holds a special significance for me, since back in August I was lucky enough to tag along as a crew filmed some of this footage in southern Ethiopia. In many ways, that trip (my first visit to Africa) is still very much on my mind: I can’t read an article about climate change without thinking about the striking effects of drought in those rural communities—and the amazing strength of the local people who are fighting back against the crisis.

One of those people is Loko Dadacha, a widow and mother of six who’s taken on a leadership role in helping her community prepare for droughts. Having read my colleague Coco’s stories about her, I have to admit I was a little bit awed by meeting Loko in person, not to mention impressed by her patience as a film crew and a crowd of Oxfam staffers followed her every move for an entire day.

“If you ask me what I wish… I would say I wish to see pasture growing, to have enough water. I wish to do things for myself—to be self-reliant,” says Loko near the end of this two-minute video. Her words really capture the way these communities are facing the massive changes in the climate: with toughness, determination, and incredible resilience.

Check out the video here:

The powerful undersea earthquake that struck near West Sumatra on September 30 killed at least 1,000 people and destroyed homes, bridges, and roads in Padang and villages north of the city. Oxfam’s Kate Thwaites describes the complex logistics of providing emergency aid to the Indonesian seaport.

There’s a strange feeling in Padang as the city begins to pick itself up almost a week after the devastating earthquake.

To a visitor like me, parts of the city look almost normal – houses are still standing, traffic seems to be moving again. Read the rest of this entry »

A resident searches for victims under a collapsed hotel in Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island. Photo by Reuters/Crack Palinggi, courtesy of www.alertnet.org

At a powwow here this morning, fund-raisers, press officers, and writers—not quite believing the cascade of bad news–huddled over the headlines sprawled across a table in one of the cubicles: “Quakes Ravage Sumatra and Samoas,” said one.

“Tsunami Came Too Fast for Warnings to Reach All,” said another.

“Typhoon Eases, Leaving More Than 300 Dead,” said a third.

And this one, which summed up the shock of it all best:  “Week of Tragedy for Asia.”

It’s a week that has left us here at Oxfam racing to help meet the needs of some of the countless people who have seen their homes crash down around them following the earthquake that hit Sumatra, their villages flattened by the tsunami that swept into Samoa and Tonga, and all that’s familiar washed away in the flooding unleashed by Typhoon Ketsana  as it roared across the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Read the rest of this entry »

Clara Herrero, a program assistant at Oxfam America, recently visited an Oxfam project in Cambodia. She traveled as part of Oxfam’s travel lottery, which sends two employees – who don’t get to travel outside the US as part of their jobs – to see our work on-the-ground in developing countries.

I recently went to Cambodia, accompanying my colleagues from Oxfam’s Humanitarian Response team as they learned more about a project teaching local communities how to adapt to climate change. It was my first time visiting one of our regional offices and my first “in the field.”

Early in my trip, I went to the Tuol Sleng Museum. During the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, the museum was a prison where millions of Cambodians (and many thousands of foreigners) were starved to death, tortured, and killed. It’s now a monument to that history and a place, which lists all the crimes of the regime.  One stood out in my mind. In Cambodia, families place great importance on eating meals together. During Pol Pot’s reign, they weren’t able to share meals with their family.

I thought a lot about this tradition as I traveled with my Oxfam colleagues, Latif, Kheng, Jacobo, and Miriam. Over the three weeks I spent in Cambodia, we began to feel like a family.

Oxfam Staff Clara Herrero, Miriam Aschkenasy, and Jacobo Ocharan take in the sights at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

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With 2008 behind us, we’re highlighting photos we think best capture Oxfam’s work last year. Here’s a photo of one of my favorite people. More to come from others.

My boss, Jane, has a saying. She wants the writers to “narrow the distance” between the poor people we work with and our readers here in The States. So, when each of us heads out into the field, we keep this mission in mind, filling our notebooks with the voices of the people we meet and the stories they have to tell.

Every year, a few people’s stories stand out. Sometimes it’s because of the sheer adversity they face. Other times, it’s the great success they’ve seen and the simplicity of the solutions they pursued. The woman I’m thinking of falls into the latter category. Her name is Seng Sreila, and I have visited her home twice in two years. She’s a rice farmer in Cambodia who took out a series of small loans from her village savings group to start her own business. With that money, she’s milling rice for other farmers in her village. Her success has become well-known in her community, and her status, that of a local celebrity.

The first time I met her, Sreila gave us the kind of welcome that’s typical of the people we meet during our travels. She was kind of shy, but had this beautiful smile that popped up whenever she was nervous. After just a few hours of talking, she treated us like good friends. When we were gathering our things to leave, she grabbed my arm in a familiar way, and walked me back to our car. As she thanked me for coming, she held my hands. I remember how hers felt; they were small, like mine.

Seng Sreila in June 2008 showing off her rice mill. Photo by Inazio.

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