Below are excerpts from Madeleine’s photoblog, which she kept while reporting in Dakar.

This land is who’s land?

March 20

Forty-year-old Ibrahima Diallo has been farming in Patte D’Oie for half his life. He concedes, though, that he doesn’t invest in his land as much as he could because of the looming fear that the government will take away his fields, as it did to those of neighboring farmers to construct a freeway. “I cannot tell you when, but I have a strong feeling that sooner or later this area is going to disappear,” Diallo said.

Patte d’oie | March 14

Patte d’oie means crow’s foot in French. It also has a secondary meaning: fork in the road. That’s a fitting name for the neighborhood of the last of the urban farmers of Dakar, cultivating produce on the scarce acres remaining of a green valley that once covered hundreds. Today you can stand on one edge of the farmland in front of a three story home with a garage, and look over plots of strawberries, lettuce, mint and yams, to rush hour traffic on the highway across the way.

Papa Gueye | March 13

Papa Gueye, 60-year old farmer and leader of the local farmers association of Kayar, a region about 40km northeast of Dakar.

Farmland turned housing | March 13

What you see are two unfinished houses and arid land blanketed with litter and limbs of plants long since dead. Just a few years ago, this was a green field of Irish potatoes, groundnuts and vegetables. Papa Gueye’s three acres were among the hundred acres taken by the local mayor in 2000 to sell to housing developers. Fortunately for Papa Gueye he had more land to continue producing, but what’s left is rapidly diminishing. Just this February, local authorities came to the area again to identify what land could be transformed into valuable housing next.

A grass that grows as tall as a farmer and is topped with a bushel of golden grains, sorghum is among the world’s most important cereals. The crop was domesticated in Ethiopia thousands of years ago and disbursed through African and Asian trade routes to become a staple of many diets throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

More recently, though, sorghum’s importance has wilted under global pressures and competition. Beginning with colonial authorities who brought their favored crops to Africa, and continuing with cheap foreign imports into African markets, and current agricultural research funded by Western nations, indigenous grains have lost their luster in the food production and dietary customs of Africa.

Gebisa Ejeta, a Purdue plant geneticist, has developed strains of the grain sorghum that have changed the lives of many farmers in Africa. The sorghum varieties are resistant to drought and a parasitic weed called striga. (Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell)

But if sorghum is, as one book coined it, a “lost crop of Africa,” the work of scientist Gebisa Ejeta has helped resurrect the grain from obscurity and obsoletion. Ejeta grew up in rural Ethiopia, and when his studies led him to the agronomy department of Purdue University, the standout student concentrated his research on the staple of his homeland. For two decades the plant breeder not only developed high-yielding sorghum hybrids that could resist the natural challenges of the African landscapes, but, as Borlaug did his semi-dwarf wheat varieties, Ejeta took his seeds to the fields of East African farmers, and oversaw the planting of one million acres of his variety on Sudanese farms.

This month, at the annual World Food Prize conference in Des Moines, Iowa, the organization founded by Norman Borlaug granted Gebisa Ejeta with its prestigious $250,000 award

After receiving the prize, Ejeta spoke with the Africa Reporting Project’s Madeleine Bair about the bias of academic and commercial investment toward Western crops.

ARP: African indigenous crops like sorghum have generally been underfunded by research organizations and commercial interests, your research being a notable exception. Does this concern you?

Ejeta: I’m concerned that we don’t have a lot of investment in sorghum research. I’m concerned that there aren’t market opportunities for crops such as sorghum. But I’m not against the development of these other crops, because they are equally important. One cannot rely only on native crops, and we need to be available to use these other crops as well. But what we need to be working on is to develop the facilities for the important crops, for native crops like sorghum and others.

ARP: Who is working on that?

Ejeta: We are all working on that. But the problem is getting support has been very difficult. So we are hoping that with the new resurgence of interest, more and more opportunities will be there to address the problems of these indigenous crops.

ARP: Why is it difficult to get support for native crops?

Ejeta: I think it’s just a history in the past that has been the problem. Many of these donor agencies want to cover crops that are important in their homelands as well because there is a mutual benefit that comes out of discoveries that are made. But that’s why we need to push (the idea) that investments in indigenous crops are equally important because if we don’t do that then there will be sectors of our society would be left unattended for. The positive aspect I want to do is not take away from the developments in others, but try to bring these indigenous crops to that level as well.

Oakland–As the sun rises over Oakland’s flatlands, Meron Temesjen tends a propane stove on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue, turning her head to avoid inhaling the fume of smoke and debris it emits. To a stranger, she looks like a camper who has wandered far from the trail.

But if anything is out of place it is the Ethiopian tradition of home coffee roasting which, in the year since she opened Café Sidamo, the 31-year-old has introduced to this central Oakland neighborhood and its steady flow of morning traffic.

“Neighbors like the smell,” says Temesjen, who goes by Mimi, as beans dance in the pan below, turning from a light green to a rich dark brown. Translucent skins pop off to the concrete and leave behind an oily veneer on the beans.

Meron Temesjen, owner of Cafe Sidamo, in her coffee shop.

In Mimi’s native Ethiopia, the preparation—and consumption—of coffee is a slow, deliberate process—nothing to be hurried by machine roasters or paper to-go cups. “Machines take all the flavor,” she says.  There, in the birthplace of the beverage, where nearly a dozen regions are known for their particular variety, beans are sold raw and roasted at home.

Mimi’s household, in a small town two hours from Addis Ababa, the capital, was no different. “Every morning I would do that for my mother,” she says, beginning when she was five years old. It takes about 45 minutes to roast a pan of beans, before letting them cool and sifting them in a basket to separate the loose skins.

For Ethiopians at home and those who gather in Café Sidamo, savoring a fresh cup takes at least as long, accompanied by a bowl of popcorn and good conversation.

“The process takes almost two hours,” says Mimi. “You have to take the time to enjoy it.”

That appreciation for making a good product is something Mimi learned back in Ethiopia, as the daughter of owners of a local hotel and coffee shop.

“I always wanted my own business,” like her parents had, she says. But that was difficult to imagine growing up in the 1980s, when her country’s name became synonymous with third-world famine. Basic resources could be there one day, gone the next. “Water, electricity—you have to struggle for everything.”

After Mimi graduated from high school, word of a letter from the U.S. president spread through town. Bill Clinton’s Diversity Visa program invited applications for a lottery offering permanent residency to immigrants from countries with low rates of U.S. immigration. Nearly a year later, Mimi learned she and her brother won, and they were soon in the East Bay, where an older sister had settled three years before.

A decade later, with the help of her husband and a small business development organization, Mimi saw her dream come to fruition in Café Sidamo, named after Ethiopia’s most famous coffee-growing region.

Tucked into a quiet strip of Telegraph Avenue, the café has the feel of a lounge, with artwork covering the walls, and a handful of tables so close together it seems they were designed to introduce patrons to one another. The chalkboard menu offers a variety of traditional American foods like pancakes, bagels, and roast beef sandwiches. But the coffee comes in one variety only: Ethiopian.

“It brings me close to my country,” she says. “When I see the coffee I know that it is from Ethiopia.”