When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

Oxfam and our partners have helped restore 4,700 acres of land to cultivation by clearing and repairing irrigation channels. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam

The muddy water coursing along the roadsides and through the rice fields of the Artibonite Valley plays a prominent role in the lives of rice farmers.  Rivers and channels nourish the rice, the vegetables, the goats and cows, and the riot of greenery in the countryside.  But when storms and hurricanes strike, it’s those same waterways that overflow and carry away livestock, drown the crops, contaminate wells, and deliver deadly cholera bacteria to rural communities.

If the water moves freely through the channels—unimpeded by sediment, weeds, and debris—the risks subside, and the benefits can transform communities, which is why we’ve focused resources on helping farmers clear more than 60 miles of irrigation canals.

Dubuisson is one of the towns where we’ve been working, and I visited there with an Oxfam team last month. Clearing channels isn’t all we’re up to in this area.  We and our partner have  introduced methods of improving rice yields, provided access to low-interest loans, and helped boost the vegetable harvest in the off season for rice. But here what people talked about most was what it’s meant to them to restore irrigation to fields that had gone dry.

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Some of my most vivid images of the Sahel food crisis are of hands and feet.

“The climate was better in the past," said Fatoumata Dioum, shown here in her garden in Fafacourou, Senegal. "Now, there is sometimes too much rain, sometimes not enough. We began to notice this more than ten years ago.”

When I traveled to Senegal recently to document Oxfam’s work on the crisis, I met with women farmers who lost their last harvest to erratic rains. Several times I noticed an injury to a woman’s foot or finger—usually something simple that without medical care had become so serious that it was disabling or worse: from the look of it, some would require amputation. But none of the women had any food stocks left  and, with prices on the rise, none could afford to purchase enough for her family to eat, so a visit to the doctor was out of the question.

The painful realities in West Africa are part of a bigger picture in which climate change and food price spikes are jeopardizing the lives and futures of many of the most vulnerable people around the world. A recent Oxfam research brief –”Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices” – explains how:

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Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal which – like much of the western Sahel region of Africa – is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the fourth of four blogs from the trip.

As photographer Holly Pickett and I traveled around the region of Kolda, Senegal, we noticed a powerful force at work in this emergency: the bond between mothers and children.

Fatoumata Dioum, the mother of two sons and two daughters, expressed the way that connection amplifies the pain of privation: “My only concern is how to buy food for my children. All the time, I’m worrying about food. When I go to bed, I worry about food. When I get up in the morning, I worry about food.”

But Holly and her camera captured something more: for many of the families caught in this crisis, the mother-child relationship also looks like one of the places where hope resides.

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The mothers I met stayed in close contact with their young children, such as here at a hygiene kit distribution. Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam

Read blogs about the situation in Senegal and our programs to improve access to food and help families protect their health.

Read about Oxfam’s work on the food crisis across the Sahel region.

An urgent request: Oxfam’s programs for this emergency are severely underfunded. Please help us with a donation if you can.

Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal which – like much of the western Sahel region of Africa – is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the third of four blogs from the trip.

Penda Balde and her husband Djibril Sylla are living in the grip of the Sahel food crisis. Their home, which they share with their children and grandchildren, is in Fafacourou, one of countless villages in Senegal where farmers lost their last harvest to the erratic rains of 2011. Their stocks of food ran out many months ago.

Residents of Fafacourou carry home hygiene kits—a collection of materials designed to help them protect their families' health. Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam

Which is why they welcomed a recent distribution of soap, bleach, and scrub brushes.

If you live in a place where clean drinking water and soap are everywhere, and where a case of waterborne disease is merely an inconvenience—easily treated and cured—it may be hard to wrap your mind around why people experiencing hunger and malnutrition would see hygiene activities as a matter of urgency. But for Balde, it is obvious. “If you don’t respect hygiene, you can get diarrhea. If you have diarrhea, you become weak.”

And Balde and Sylla can’t afford to be weak.

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Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal which – like much of the western Sahel region of Africa – is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the second of four blogs.

At dawn in the marketplace in the southern town of Kolda, all I can hear are crickets and birds and from time to time the bleat of a goat. A dog—lean as a greyhound—trots silently past the shrouded tables and shuttered storefronts on a mission that doubtless involves food. But with the buzz of a motorbike and the rumble of a truck, the delicate sounds of the morning fade, and the lively commotion of trade takes center stage.

Although last year’s harvest was a disaster, food makes its way here to the market one way or another. Big trucks parked in the side streets are full of goods imported from other regions, and soon white vans arrive from the countryside, filled to bursting with people and whatever they’ve managed to raise or forage in the run-up to the next harvest.

In crises like this, aid groups traditionally deliver food and hand it out for free to those who lack the means to buy it, but that approach can undermine local farmers and vendors who are themselves struggling hard to feed their families.

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Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal, which—like much of the western Sahel region of Africa—is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the first of four blogs from the trip.

In Senegal, the seasonal rains have arrived, and as we drove out from the town of Kolda to surrounding villages, the countryside was a lush green. Flourishing rice paddies and cornfields auger well for the harvest in the fall. There is food on the market streets—mangoes, rice, and a host of vegetables—and the livestock market, with its sleek oxen and healthy young stock, is thriving.

But, as with the famous optical illusion of the vase and two profiles, you can’t understand what is in front of your eyes until you examine the negative space that surrounds it.

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Drought has reduced available pasture for livestock herds in eastern Senegal. Photo by Aliou Bassoum/Oxfam America.

Second of two posts by guest blogger Aliou Bassoum, Oxfam America’s regional communications officer in Dakar, Senegal.

It takes a little more than an hour on a red dirt road through forests and millet fields to find the village of Balkissima, population 162. We can still see a few stalks in the fields, left over from the harvest last fall here in the region of Kolda. According to an assessment by the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization in November, about 138,800 people in Kolda are at high risk of food insecurity.

Some of them are here. They are mostly farmers and herders in Balkissima, a small village with a few mud-walled houses. Around one of them, the home of the chief, stand a few cows. This area is well known for raising livestock.

The food crisis here in southern Senegal is not just hitting people. The livestock are also suffering, and becoming quite skinny, almost puny in size. The village chief, Amadou Korka Balde, says it is due to lack of pasture in the area, and the poor quality of what grass is there during the dry winter months.

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To reach their fields, farmers must cross a seasonal stream in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

We had a lot of rain here in the Boston area this spring. Endless rain, it felt like. Would it ever stop?

I’m embarrassed now to have whined about it when I think what some steady rain could do for people in the Horn of Africa. Many of them are desperate for it.

The late 2010 rainy season failed completely in many parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. And in some districts of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, the March through May rains have been only about 10 percent of average. For herders and farmers who depend on every drop, the consequences could be severe: Already there are reports of hundreds of thousands of animals having died.

Climate change is leading to longer, hotter dry periods, shorter growing seasons, and unpredictable rainfall patterns—all of which make it harder for farmers, both experienced and just learning, to decide when to sow and cultivate their crops. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I asked a simple question on Facebook and Twitter: Fill in the blank: food security means _______.  I asked, not just out of curiosity, but because I hear the words “food security” floating around a lot in the Oxfam America headquarters. I knew that outside of the office it’s a term that could be interpreted in many different ways. And even though the term is academic, the concept is important. Hunger is an issue that Oxfam has been addressing for decades, but with climate change and soaring food prices, food security is back in the spotlight.

So that’s why we asked people to give us their take.  Read a few of their answers below, then tell us what food security means to you:

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Hanging bridge over the Rio Chixoy. Photo by James Rodtiguez/Oxfam America

From the hills above the Rio Chixoy, Guatemala, it’s hard to even tell there is a bridge across the river, but it is really there.  Getting closer to it confirms its existence: It consists of 12 half-inch steel wires stretched across nearly one thousand feet between the high river banks, with wood slats wired unevenly into place. The entire thing wobbles back and forth, and bounces up and down, so as to make it hard to fit your feet firmly on the wood treads.

You don’t want to look down when walking on a hanging bridge such as this, but you have to in order to ensure your feet don’t just fall between the slats and into the clear space between the wires.

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