In Cote d’Ivoire, women have for years organized in cooperatives to produce and sell the Attieke, the West African country’s national dish.

Now, Attieke, a couscous, plays an important role for food security as the country struggles to get out of a decade of political turmoil.

Attiekedrom, the making of the national dish from bagassi Koura on Vimeo.

This story originally aired on Living on Earth, a weekly environmental news and information program distributed by Public Radio International.

Weaving Dreams: Tracing Cotton and Fashion in Africa from Amanda Martinez on Vimeo.

AP: Federal regulators launch probe of big agriculture
The Associated Press recently reported that the first joint workshops on agriculture by regulators at the U.S. Justice and Agriculture Departments was expected to give farmers, lobbyists, executives and academics a strong indication of where the Obama administration stands on consolidation in agriculture. The administration’s biggest concern has been the concentration of power in rural America. According to the story, farmers felt it was the most attention paid in years to their long-standing complaints that big corporations are choking out smaller players while industry officials and farming groups saw the move as a possible step toward legal action.

The New Vision: Fruit farmers to reap from Coca-Cola, Gates project
A new partnership between Coca-Cola, TechnoServe and the Gates Foundation hopes to enable farmers increase their productivity and double their incomes by 2014. The project is aimed at creating market opportunities for local farmers whose fruit will be used in Coca-Cola’s locally-produced fruit juices, a representative from the company told The New Vision, a Ugandan news Web site. Many multinational corporations import fruit juice concentrate into the country because of the perceived lack of local fruit supply, according to the article. But this partnership could create an attractive long-term opportunity for farmers since there is now a compelling market need for domestically produced mango and passion fruit.

Africa is a Country: Playground Politics
Kids have the unique ability to take the most complex ideas and break them down into the most simple terms. Take, for example, this Funny or Die clip posted on one of the blogs we follow, Africa is a Country, in which children bring satire to an interpretation of the reasons behind the food crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.

The fellowships will each total $36,000, including round trip airfare, professional stipends, and rent while in Berkeley.

The selected fellows will join the School’s Visiting International Scholars Program and participate in a new journalism training initiative aimed to provide high quality coverage of agricultural development issues in Africa for dissemination in U.S., African, and international media. The initiative will also offer dedicated funding for both domestic U.S. and Africa travel for research and reporting work.

Requirements:

Selected fellows must bring at least five years experience in journalism in sub-Saharan Africa, in any medium including print newspaper, magazine, television, radio, documentary, or new media format such as blogging, podcasting, and other online publishing.

Applicants also must demonstrate a proven track record of commitment to the truth-seeking craft, and a willingness to effectively investigate the problems of hunger on the continent with an aim to publish or broadcast stories about these topics and bring them to light in compelling form for audiences in Africa and around the world. A B.A. degree, at minimum, is strongly desired, along with experience and knowledge about agricultural issues in the applicant’s native country.

Selected African fellows will enroll with other Visiting Scholars in background courses at Berkeley examining the global food crisis starting in late August 2010, while also contributing their knowledge about Africa and journalism to their U.S. and international peers.

Please submit applications via the online form.

To access the form, use the password:

africa2010

The form provides spaces to include your resume, a one-page cover letter containing a statement of interest, and links to three examples of work.

For questions, contact africa@journalism.berkeley.edu

Deadline for applications: Monday, March 29, 2010

This opportunity is part of a two-year grant provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

He has experience living and working in Eastern Africa and Europe. His current work and research include policy, institutional and implementation issues related to poverty reduction, rural development, civil society, democracy, governance, environmental factors, drought management, conflict mitigation and international trade.

For this week’s One Question, we ask Halderman to explain his views about what it would take to have pastoralists’ issues taken more seriously in African countries where they are prevalent.

Generations of experts have dedicated their careers to finding ways to make sure children around the world have enough to eat. As Beth Hoffman reports from Uganda, some are turning to an overlooked bird to provide food and income.

This story was first broadcast on Living on Earth, an independent weekly environmental news program.

Feb. 3

Before I share my recollections on my last night in the country, I wanted to share something I forgot to mention in the last entry.

On the night we get back from Pujehun, after everyone had dropped off their bags at Sahid’s place, I was sitting in the foyer of the house just outside of the living room waiting for the Internet to load when Augustine, the teenager who stays with Sahid and his family in Freetown, approached me very quietly. I could tell he was connecting with me since we first began talking about hip hop in America.

So when he approached me, he was very honest. Standing against the wall, he told me that his views about agriculture had changed since I had arrived. A few days ago, he was explaining how he, like many youths in Freetown, felt agriculture was not appealing to him. But he said he had witnessed my commitment to my assignment and how I had traveled to each youth farming group in the provinces to hear what they had to say about agriculture. That effort, he said, had inspired him to perhaps go into farming after he finishes secondary school.

That statement right there should be an indication that youths’ attitudes about agriculture in Sierra Leone are indeed changing.

My last night in Sierra Leone was a memorable one. I guess I made such an impression on one of the youth groups that I interviewed in Waterloo that they decided to show their appreciation by hosting a send-off party for me and my guides. Mind you, these are youths from a rural part of the country who often can’t afford to finish school, who don’t have anyone supporting their organization, who have to struggle for everything. Yet they plan this big celebration just for us. We ate, danced and perspired until about 2 in the morning.

They put so much effort into it. They cleared out a room in their multipurpose center and had a few lights hanging from the ceiling. They got chairs for me, Sahid and Theo to sit on, a table and a table cloth, plates, glasses, silverware, napkins and plenty of Fanta (for me, of course), beer and palm wine, and a D.J. These were all rare sites in most of the places we have visited at night. As I’m writing this, I can still hear LRG’s “Money in the Bank” and everyone jumping to the middle of the room and dancing in a circle when they hear it.

As I traveled back home, I stopped at Heathrow Airport in London for one of my layovers. I walked through the airport to my gate, and what did I see? A Tiffany’s store with the best of the world’s diamonds on display for all of those passengers who just can’t leave London without a piece of high-class jewelry in their suitcase. I want to qualify this by saying that I have no problem with Tiffany’s or anyone who shops there. But, at that moment, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that 25-year-old guy I met in Kono who was in that mining pit, knee-deep in the murky, sewer-brown water, working for meager wages and searching for a diamond he may never find.

Feb. 2

I’ve been without the electricity or time now to jot down my daily thoughts for a while. But here are my recollections of the last few days.

On Friday, we traveled to Kono in the eastern part of the country. It is known as the breadbasket of the country because of its rich diamond resources. How do you know you’re in Kono? You can feel the bumpy roads along the way to the district (and, in the case of the video below, you can hear them as well).

I saw a mining site, where I interviewed a 25-year-old guy who had been working in the pit for about five years. Diamond miners spend the whole day swishing around gravel in a pan looking for the precious metals. The diamond boom here has subsided, so discoveries are quite rare these days. Most people just find these tiny black rocks which they call “black material,” which is supposed to indicate to the miners that a diamond is near. I asked the guy when’s the last time he found a diamond. He couldn’t remember (or maybe he wouldn’t tell me).

We visited a war memorial, which is housed in a rebuilt building where eight people were burned alive by the rebels during the civil war. On one of the posters inside the memorial read:

“Mammy Isata has described how in pain and death by fire the victims ‘gripped’ one another. The skeletons stood against the wall. One person escaped.”

That represents just a small portion of the destruction the war caused. You can see other remnants of the war in the hollowed-out buildings that still stand throughout most of the rural provinces.

I lost my footing on the way to one of the many farms I have visited here. I don’t know if it was because of exhaustion or just thinking this was another simple hike (it was not!), but it resulted in both of my shoes being baptized in the swamp mud.

On Sunday, we traveled to Pujehun in the southern region of the country. On the way, we stopped in Bo, the second-largest city in the country, to watch a soccer game in a sports bar where the Manchester United vs. Arsenal game was playing on the big screen. I noticed that the Africa Cup of Nations championship game was showing only on a bunch of small screens throughout the place, and no one was paying attention to it. Sahid said that’s because when African players play for their own countries, they aren’t as good as when they play for foreign teams.

We spent all Monday in Pujehun. The first thing I noticed about this place was how it looked like there was only one short block of homes in the center of the district with working electricity. Those homes provide the only glimmer of light for as far as the eye can see. As for the rest of the homes, many are subject to no electricity or running water. Theo told me everything is politicized here. You can tell where that is true.

We woke up early the next morning to visit the next set of groups, and I was glad to be spending the day in the environments of the youth farming groups. I spent a lot of time in the bush, where you can see acres and acres of cassava, palm trees, pineapple, coconut and even apples. I also saw benny, a staple crop here, but it was either brown or wilted because, like in Kono, the government gave the groups their seeds too late in the rainy season for them to harvest.

Later in the night, back at the guest house, we met up with another Sierra Leonean journalist who knows Sahid and Theo. We talked for hours, and during one of the conversations the journalist told me he heard about my arrival in Pujehun even before we had met. As a TV journalist for the southern region, he said it is his job to check in with the city council in the area everyday to check on the day’s events. He said he met with the council administrator, who told him he had met with a delegation of journalists earlier in the day, including a white man. The white man he was referring to was me. I couldn’t help but chuckle because I had been anticipating this moment while I was here. No doubt, my skin tone is fairer than about 99.99% of the people in Sierra Leone. For many of them, the only person they’ve seen with my same complexion was probably Barack Obama (as a matter of fact, many people here say I look like him). So most people here assumed I was black like Obama, meaning one of my parents is white. I explained that both of my parents are black, and that in the U.S. there are many shades of black. I don’t mind the misunderstanding, but I do mind that council administrator blatantly disrespecting us like that, especially since earlier that day we went out of our way to meet with him and explain what I was doing there. Another reminder that even though you may be a black man, let alone a black journalist, in Africa, sometimes you are still considered just another American.

By JULIET TOROME

NAIROBI — When I met Eunice Wangari at a Nairobi coffee shop recently, I was surprised to hear her on her mobile phone, insistently asking her mother about the progress of a corn field in her home village, hours away from the big city. A nurse, Wangari counts on income from farming to raise money to buy more land – for more farming.

Photo from flickr via donkeycart

Even though Wangari lives in Kenya’s capital, she is able to reap hundreds of dollars a year in profit from cash crops grown with the help of relatives. Her initial stake – drawn from her nursing wages of about $350 a month – has long since been recovered.

Wangari is one of thousands of urban workers in Kenya – and one of hundreds of thousands, even millions, across Africa – who are increasing their incomes through absentee agriculture. With prices for basic foodstuffs at their highest levels in decades, many urbanites feel well rewarded by farming.

Absentee agriculture also bolsters national pride – and pride in traditional diets – by specializing in vegetables specific to the region. “For too long our country has been flooded with imported food and Westernized foods,” Wangari says. “This is our time to fight back – and grow our own.”

Across Africa, political leaders, long dismissive of rural concerns, have awakened to the importance of agriculture and the role that educated people, even those living in major cities, can play in farming. In Nigeria, former President Olusegun Obasanjo has a huge diversified farm and has pushed for policies to help absentee farmers prosper. In Uganda, Vice President Gilbert Bukenya routinely travels the country, promoting higher-value farming, such as dairy production.

Perhaps the most visible political support for absentee agriculture is in Liberia, a small West African country where civil war destroyed agriculture, rendering the population dependent on food imports, even today. President Johnson-Sirleaf, recognizing that educated people could contribute much to an agriculture revival, launched her “Back to the Soil” campaign in June 2008 in large part to encourage urban dwellers to farm.

To be sure, absentee farming by elites and educated urban workers can’t solve all of Africa’s urgent food needs. Moreover, absentee farmers face unexpected problems. Because they don’t visit their fields often, they rely heavily on relatives and friends.  When I decided to farm wheat for the first time this spring on leased land in my childhood village, my mother agreed to supervise plowing, planting, and harvesting. Without her help, I might not have farmed at all.

Even with mother’s help, I have worries. Although I grew up around wheat fields, my knowledge of farming is thin. Fertilizer and spraying were both more expensive than I thought. While my wheat stalks are sprouting on schedule, I now fear that at harvest time – in November – prices will fall and I won’t recoup my costs.

One key tool is the mobile phone. My hopes for success are buoyed by my ability to call my mother inexpensively and discuss the farm. We even decided over the phone what kind of pesticide to use and which tractor company to hire.

Because they know both the tastes of fellow city dwellers and rural conditions, many urban farmers are succeeding. In fact, some city dwellers don’t even bother with acquiring land or gaining distant help. Certain crops can be grown in their own homes. James Memusi, an accountant, grows mushrooms in a spare bedroom, selling them to nearby hotels and supermarkets.

Nevertheless, most people living in Africa’s cities have access to land in the countryside, which is why Liberia’s government rightly highlights the potential for farm expansion. In a new advertising campaign rolled out this summer, the authorities declared, “The soil is a bank; invest in it.”

In Liberia, the main push is to reduce imports of staples such as rice and tomatoes. In more prosperous countries, African elites are motivated by a complex interplay of national pride, dietary concerns, and the pursuit of profit. In Zambia, for example, Sylva Banda ignited a craze for authentic traditional meals two decades ago with a chain of popular restaurants. Now, ordinary Lusakans want to cook similar meals in their own homes, driving demand for farmers who produce such delicacies as dried pumpkin, “black jack” leaves, and fresh Okra.

Similarly, in Nairobi, Miringo Kinyanjui, another woman entrepreneur, is supplying unrefined – and more nutritious – maize and wheat flour. In another move to distinguish her ingredients from Western versions, Kinyanjui also sells through grocery stores flour flavored with Amarathan, a green vegetable that grows around Kenya.

The revival of traditional foods has attracted the attention of large multinational corporations. Last year, Unilever’s Kenyan branch ran a “taste our culture” campaign in support of its line of traditional East African herbs and spices.

Such campaigns go hand-in-hand with expanded farming, because sellers of these foods prefer nearby growers – even if these growers increasingly live in the city.

Juliet Torome is a writer and documentary filmmaker originally from Kenya who is now living in California. She was awarded Cine-source magazine’s first-annual Flaherty documentary award in 2009.