Take a drive around rural Ghana and large swathes of the country appear green and fertile.

The current supply of local rice is less than a third of the demand but there is potential for a green revolution here. And as international rice prices escalate, experts say the time is right.

“I believe if we used just 1% of what we spend in a year on importing rice to build up our own rice industry we could be self sufficient,” says Kofi Dartey of Ghana’s Crop Research Institute, based in Kumasi.

Click here for full story

At the height of the demonstration, before riot police started firing tear gas, IRIN saw around 1,500 protestors chanting “we are hungry” and “life is too expensive, you are going to kill us.”

“A kilo of beef has increased from 700 CFA (US$1.68) to 900 CFA (US$2.16) in just three days,” one of the protestors, Amélie Koffi, told IRIN. “One litre of oil has increased from 600 CFA (US$1.44) to 850 CFA (US$2.04) in the same time.”

“We only eat once during the day now,” said another protestor, Alimata Camara. “If food prices increase more, what will we give our children to eat and how will they go to school?”

Click here for full article: IRIN Africa

“Born in Sweden, but came to Niger at the age of six. Still around. Am the greatest Niger fan you can find and cannot think of a better way to live my life than working for Eden Foundation in the Tanout zone. This blog is about living life as an unpaid volunteer and trying to make the best out of every day (sometimes possible, sometimes not) while helping the people of the least developed area of the least developed country in the world achieve a sustainable life.”

Click here: Esther Garvi Blog

Rice breeders in West Africa have finally been able to combine the local-stress adaptation of African rice with the high yield potential of Asian rice.

The result is something that can revolutionize rice farming in Sub-Saharan Africa: rice that will produce a crop with minimal inputs in Africa’s stress-afflicted ecologies, and that will respond bountifully as soon as farmers have the means to apply additional inputs.

Click here: NERICA - New Rice for Africa

Click here: Africa Rice Centre

Their web site offers reliable information on Moringa and a platform to exchange knowledge, products and services.

Moringa is a tropical multipurpose tree. It is resistant to drought and fast growing.

Moringa is raising a growing international interest among NGOs, scientists and the private sector, as a source of: food supplement, flocculent for water treatment, cosmetic oil, vegetable and fodder.

Click here: MoringaNews

WFP is the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. Operations aim to:

• Save lives in refugee crises and other emergencies
• Improve nutrition and quality of life of world’s most vulnerable people at critical times in their lives
• Enable development by (a) helping people build assets that benefit them directly; (b) promoting the self-reliance of poor people and communities

Click here: World Food Programme

Everyone who has a small holding of land on which they try to grow sufficient food to feed their own family and create a surplus to sell at market. This is the daily struggle of countless millions in rural areas across the least developed countries.

However, depending on what report you happen to be reading at the time, different people are described as being the key to solving this problem. Kofi Annan said that girls in rural areas are the ‘key of key’s’ while others advocate it is women. Here the term ‘global epicentre’ is used to further emphasis the point.

What really needs to be acknowledged is that everyone plays their part in the reduction and eventual eradication of extreme poverty. It is the role of the small holder farmer that is really important here because they are the frontline of food production for both rural and urban populations. If they can be helped so their role is fully acknowledged and supported, the chances of the correct funding levels being achieved, will be realised.

This could lead to a fundamental shift in the balance of food production onto the local small holder and remove the need for high levels of international food aid. If they can be successfully empowered then real progress can be made in this important area of international development.

What kind of support is needed to scale up the efforts to aid small holder farmers? Is it increased levsl of funding, is it the supply of machinery and technical interventions or is it the supply of quality soil nutrients, allowing greater yields per hectare.

Whatever method of support is identified as the most relevant, we are still faced with the prospect that nothing will happen because it is all dependent, once more, on international agencies providing this aid. The international community is great at verbalising how the subject can best be supported and even solved, but the practical side of this equation is very rarely, if ever, seen through, so those on the front line actually benefit.

In all practical terms, the legacy of the developed world’s support to Africa, will probably be as always just like a school report - show’s good effort, with some progress but if they applied themslves, they could probably do better. C-

We live in a world of surplus in virtually all areas yet we seem incapable or perhaps even unwilling to do the most basic things to support our fellow human beings, in the daily struggle to exist at all.

Under the burden of chronic poverty and hunger, livestock herders, subsistence farmers, forest dwellers and fisherfolk may use their natural environment in unsustainable ways, leading to further deterioration of their livelihood conditions.

When you have nothing and need to earn a living to merely survive everyday, you tend to give very little thought to what damage your actions maybe having on the environment. The cutting down of trees is a way of providing firewood to cook your food and feed your family. It clears the trees to provide new land to farm, rich in nutrients because other areas have been leeched of all the usuable soil nutrients.

Everything provided by the natural environment becomes something useful in the survival battle. As always it is those with nothing or very little, who the developed world tends to blame for the problems we experience with the environment. We expect and even demand that these people reduce their use of fossil fuels because of damaging carbon emissions, just at the point in their own development where entry to the industrialised world means the mass production of power for electricity.

They have no finance available yet we expect them to use renewable energy sources like hydro, wind and solar power but these are still the most expensive forms of power generation today. They will continue to be so until the developed world invests in them sufficiently for the production costs to fall. The developed world should stop preaching about fossil fuels in developing countries and support them fully to develop the clean end of the power generation technology. The use of carbon credits is another money making smoke screen that diverts the guilt away from the developed world.

In the developed world we are still unable to get the urban and rural dwelling populations to agree on the best ways to promote the countryside as a healthy leisure destinations and still protect the rural way of life. In the United Kingdom the differences between these two groups are so marked, that the subject is reported on as an assault by city dwellers on the rural way of life. It even goes so far as to suggest that certain ’sports’ are not suitable and they constantly disagree about how to work together for the common good.

Therefore to say that the custodians of the land in developing countries need to be empowered to stop the degradation of the natural environment, is a very over simplistic and easier said than done point.

We are unable as an international community to find a workable solution to the question of how best to divert poppy growers away from the drugs trade that they inadvertently support. These people need to feed and support their families and are forced economically to grow the only ‘cash’ crop that provides them a sustainable income. To swoop from the sky in billion dollar helicopters and burn their crops, because people thousands of miles away have the disposable income to ‘do drugs’ is not really the answer to the problem.

We have to find a way to provide these people with a sustainable long term alternative. The developed world is full of stories about drugs and trafficking and how it needs to be stopped. We have even gone to war and invaded countries to stop this trade, yet we are told it is still increasing.

Hopefully the solution to helping the poppy grower through guaranteeing a price for any food crop cultivated other than poppies, can be adapted to help the small holder in other parts of the developing world who is growing the only thing he can sell rather than something that could help them and their neighbours, rather than food aid being shipped in to feed people.