A group whose mission is to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth wants people to get the complete story about African farmers. Heifer International issued its State of the African Farmer report to add to the debate on agriculture and food security in Africa.
Elizabeth Bintliff, vice president of Heifer’s Africa Program, is an African born in Cameroon, and brings her own perspective to the contents of this book. Although she recognized the need for statistics and data, she is a passionate advocate of the personal stories she sees everyday in her work, and is concerned that Africans often become an impersonal statistic that doesn’t give the complete story.
“African farmers, specifically, who are the people I most often come across in my work, are victims of this phenomenon. Worse still, the statistics are dire, ominous, and dismal,” said Bintliff.
This report puts smallholder farmers at the center of the dialog about agriculture in Africa. Too often, the conversation about farming is conceptual and macroeconomic in scale, she said. In this report, Heifer and other respected contributors go beyond the numbers and data to discuss the farmer as a person, engaging in agriculture, faced daily with both opportunities and challenges.
Heifer International officials say that all of our futures that are linked together and will be until the end of poverty and until Africa is fed.
You can download a PDF of the report here.