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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Welcome to Nourishing the Planet’s Diary

4140237995_2bc5254e4e_m.jpgWelcome to the Nourishing the Planet project diary on Motley Moose. As world hunger numbers top 1 billion, we are reporting from on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa to both inform global efforts to eradicate hunger and raise the profile of these efforts. Meeting with farmers, farmers groups, NGO’s, journalists, funders, and policy makers, the Nourishing the Planet is assessing the state of agricultural innovations-from cropping methods to irrigation technology to agricultural policy-and highlighting the all too often untold stories of hope and success. To read more, previous Motley Moose entries by Nourishing the Planet can be found here and to find out more about the project see our blog. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Questions? Comments? Please contact Worldwatch Senior Researcher Danielle Nierenberg at dnierenberg@worldwatch.org.


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3 comments

  1. Peter Jukes

    You might not get many comments (though you’d get more if you replied) but don’t doubt you work is read, appreciated and (as someone who love visiting Africa and has relatives there) a little bit envied.

    If you ever want to corral together some Moose Volunteers to help your projects, just let us know. Maybe we can raise sponsorship, and have our first big Moose Moot in the Sub Sahara.  

  3. Chris Blask

    I’m never far from having some, but you guys really top me up!

    The role you play in informing others on what is being done and what works is imho nearly immeasurably valuable.  In the same way that early “starving children in XYZ” ads did add value by educating others about the problems, you educate others about solutions.   The former may have been useful when ignorance was the roadblock to solutions, but that path has turned to produce little but cynicism today.

    My role in all this is tends to be to ponder the progress and place in history.  Are we moving forward or sliding backward?  As anyone who has been unable to avoid listening to me knows, in general over most practical timeframes it seems we have moved forward in most ways.  To that end, your comment about “world hunger numbers approaching 1 billion” brings to my mind one of the metrics I reference for this problem.  According to Sci Am in recent years there were in 1960 1B people out of 3B alive living in persistent hunger, in ~2004 there were by the same measure 850M out of 6.5B in the same circumstance, and the physical geography where persistent hunger was endemic had reduced dramatically over the same period.

    I don’t know whether the measures are the same between the study referenced in SciAm and your source.  It would not be surprising if the last several years’ global economics had increased the numbers living with persistent hunger, so assuming we are talking apples and apples I wonder whether the uptick is long or short?  Are we improving over say the last ten or twenty years, or have we reversed the trend?

    Keep up the good work!

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