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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Congo’s Female Victims of Violence Benefit from micro-farming assistance

Small is beautiful in Congo farming

TheStar.com – World

Officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo fear that the food rioting that has wreaked havoc in 30 other countries will break out in theirs, where, in rural areas, people spend 80 per cent of their household money on food. More than a quarter of the population — some 16 million people — are undernourished.

In this war-torn land, helping people feed themselves is a critical weapon against poverty

July 27, 2008
Mitch Potter, Toronto Star European Bureau

KATUBA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — A lone voice sings out in Swahili as the women enter the fields, and the call is answered in unison. Suddenly the tiny valley is alive with a delicate weave of joyful harmonies.

Here is one hopeful sliver in the broken heart of Africa.

The source of glee seems almost meagre, but in the lives of the mostly female growers of Katuba, it is everything: these 500 women are singing in praise of their own private green revolution, a turnaround created with deceptive simplicity – handfuls of carefully selected seeds, a few tools and watering cans, access to just enough credit and food aid to get it off the ground. And the result for many is a tripling of farm incomes in a span of three years through raising fresh-for-market garden produce.

Four dollars a day isn’t much, not even here in eastern Congo. But it is an uncommon sum, fully double what an estimated 300 million sub-Saharan Africans – including a quarter of the world’s hungriest – struggle to attain. Crucially for Katuba, the bounty of Chinese cabbage, spinach, carrots and subtropical greens from these tiny plots translates into belly-filling food security, with enough surplus to keep kids clothed and in school.

“We eat maybe 10 per cent and we sell the rest – even from these small gardens, it works,” says Rebecca Tshidibi, 24, who founded Katuba’s Association of Women for Integrated Development on 60 hectares of unworked but arable land, with a hidden agenda to mend a community shattered by five years of regional conflict deadlier than any since World War II.

A third of these women are HIV carriers, others are victims of sexual violence and others still are refugees returning from nightmares untold. Everyone ranks as a survivor of a civil war that claimed as many as five million Congolese, most not from bullets or bombs but from diseases that prey on the acutely malnourished.

“The women with the virus, they were isolated and depressed,” says Tshidibi. “They had no direction in life. The best part of what we are building is that today they belong. Now, the women with HIV are the core of our project. The success of our garden is making us a community again.”

In Katuba and a dozen similar sites visited by the Toronto Star during a two-week journey into some of the most remote parts of eastern Congo, the same grassroots theme arises time and again: when it comes to African agriculture, small is beautiful. Where there are no roads to speak of – and in many parts of Congo, a 100-kilometre journey can eat up an entire day – dramatic investment in helping the population to feed itself is the obvious way forward.

Only now, as skyrocketing food prices expose the neglected state of farming on the continent, are fledgling local governments and the mandarins of global aid coming to the same conclusion. In the Congo alone, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is unfurling $50 million worth of emergency development projects to help unleash the growing potential of smallholder associations like Katuba’s.

“Small is beautiful,” says Keith Wiebe, a development economist with the FAO. “It is by no means the only answer. But more and more, people are realizing that the really basic inputs – good seeds and fertilizer, access to a little bit of credit – will go a very long way toward restoring food security for Africa.”

Read more at: Congo Women benefit from small-scale farming project

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