SANTIAGO, May 18 2017 (IPS) - Water at high prices, sold as a market good, and small farmers almost a species in extinction, replaced by seasonal workers, are the visible effects of the crisis in rural Chile, 50 years after a land reform which postulated that “the land is for those who work it.”
Sixty percent of Zambians are small-scale farmers, who make up many of the nation's poorest people but produce 85 percent of its food
LONDON, May 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Zambia's smallholder farmers could be made squatters on their own land as the country opens up to farming multinationals in an effort to boost its economy, said a United Nations expert.
Tina Anyango (not her real name) aged 28 is a widow living in Kuoyo Kaila, East seme Ward in Kisumu County. She is living with HIV which robbed her off the man she had lived with and loved for the past eight years. Her husband’s death left her solely responsible for their two children. To meet their needs, she depended on a one-acre piece of land she and her husband used to do farming together.
Campesinos producing coca, opium poppies and marijuana in Latin America try to make a living but become victims of a drug war.
Faced with few other viable alternatives for growing profitable legal crops, many campesinos have relied on growing marijuana, coca and opium poppies to help them survive, but are subjected the rules of the state and organized crime groups.
ELENERAI, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Norah Chepkulul, a single mother of two young sons, stands outside her home, a grass thatched hut surrounded by cactus-like euphoria trees on the dusty Maasai Mara road in Kenya's Rift Valley.
She has just finished milking her four cows and has asked the boys to keep an eye on the goats corralled in the little compound.
Over the past several years, the people of Jemna, a region in southern Tunisia famous for its excellent quality dates called Deglet Nour (the dates of light), have been engaged in an important and inspiring struggle around land rights.
Disputes over Brazil’s farmland are growing increasingly violent, pitting farmers against the original residents of the area
Next time you bite into a chocolate bar, think of Africa. The continent produces nearly 70 percent of the world’s cocoa, a growing output that requires carving more than 325,000 acres of new farmland from forests every year – a drop in the bucket of overall agricultural expansion there.
Dr (Mrs) Ladi Shambo is the MD of Dijmeds Ventures Limited, a company that is into food processing and Shea butter processing.
After her retirement from the civil service, she decided to start producing spices.
“I produce ginger powder, garlic powder, chili pepper and mixed spice (‘yaji’) and ‘garin danwake’. These products have NAFDAC number and are in the market.
In almost every aisle of the grocery store, you can find products from the palm oil, soy, wood, and cattle industries. Together, these industries are responsible for more than a third of tropical deforestation annually, according to the non-profit organization Forest Trends. While strides have been made by all four industries toward establishing deforestation-free commodity supply chains, the cattle industry has lagged behind the others.
