Today is World Food Day and to celebrate, we want to share the success you’ve helped bring to hungry families around the world.
The global message from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for this year’s World Food Day is “Climate is Changing. Food and agriculture must too.”
It’s clear that the world’s poorest are being hit hardest by the effects of climate change. In places where food supplies are already limited, the growing threat of weather-related disasters puts many parts of the world at high risk of a serious hunger crisis.
To battle this, and other threats to the availability of food, ADRA puts a strong emphasis on resilience. A great example is one of our most successful food security projects, ASOTRY in Madagascar.
Ambinanindovoka
Ambinanindovoka is a tongue-twister of a name, but the village in Madagascar that bears that name is where we found one of our favorite success stories from the ASOTRY project.
ADRA began a farmer field school in Ambinanindovoka not long ago. Poverty is high here; cattle bandits regularly target what little livestock the residents can afford, and the rolling landscape is beautiful but causes challenges for farming.
On a cloudy December day, our truck bounced along behind a roaring dirt bike, over high hills and across some of the most beautiful landscapes we’ve ever seen. On the dirt bike was Ernest, ADRA Madagascar’s local agricultural agent. He and other ADRA staff have helped transform the village’s fields from unproductive to overflowing.
Ernest helps lead a Farmer Field School in Ambinanindovoka. He and the other staff teach community farmers new techniques to improve the amount of nutritious food they produce. It may sound simple, but when seeds sprout successfully on the side of steep hills where crops struggled before, it is truly life-changing.
Farmers in the program learn how to terrace hillside gardens and preserve precious water, how to use fewer seeds but harvest more produce with orderly planting, and how to create veggie fertilizer so they depend less on livestock, to reduce the threat of the cattle bandits.
Getting our hands dirty and working side by side with the people we serve is amazing, and there is no better success to us than seeing a community thrive who once struggled. But this success started with you. The seeds for every Farmer Field School project across Madagascar is bought from the money raised during our annual $1=$7 match! And the seeds are bought from farmers who graduated from other former Farmer Field Schools in the country.
