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Food Insecurity In America

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Dr. Terry Leahy, Lecturer in sociology and anthropology at the University of Newcastle, spoke about establishing food security in rural South and South Eastern Africa. He particularly focused on current projects and the role of permaculture in addressing food insecurity.
Dr. Leahy defines permaculture as a set of ideas which attempt to develop sustainable agriculture by having a wide variety of plants in small areas, particularly local cultivars well suited to the climate. The plants will not require expensive inputs such as fertilizer and local farmers can cultivate the crops themselves. Due to socioeconomic factors in the region, permaculture is particularly effective, even though it is not commercially profitable. In many of these …show more content…

The two major types of projects are community group entrepreneurial projects and the leading farmer projects. When Dr Leahy was working in the region, only two out of ten projects that he has seen over the last twenty years were still in operation.
In a community group project, twenty to sixty unrelated villagers from the ‘poorest of the poor’ are brought together with a senior villager in charge. They are given resources such as seeds, fertilizer, farming equipment and fencing to grow commercial crops on land usually used for grazing, with initial sales used to maintain production. This type of project rarely works; the typical success rate is one in eight. The major problems are that people are not accustomed to working in large groups, have inadequate financial skills due to a lack of education, and jealousy or distrust of leadership is common. In the Voordonker chicken project which involved 11 participants who were given 100 chickens and 24 bags of layer mash to start an egg farm, members would take the eggs and not return the money, there were problems with bookkeeping and members who were not working wanted a share of the profits. As a result, fifteen chickens died of disease, members of the project left due to discontentment and there was insufficient income to buy mash; therefore, the project site was abandoned. In leading farmer projects,

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