Soils, Food and Healthy Communities

Lizzie Shumba, the project coordinator for SFHC, arrived in Canada May 29 2013, and presented at the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s General Assembly on Friday, May 31. She will be presenting at 6 different churches in Canada as well as a conference in Winnipeg on ‘Fighting Hunger’. Two community promoters, Mr. Malumbo Mithi and Mrs. Esther Maona, who have worked with the project since the beginning, accompanied Mrs. Shumba. They were all warmly welcome by the Presbyterian World Service and Development staff, who helped to arrange their trip. Lizzie’s talk can be viewed at the following link, at the 1 hour 5 minute mark:

http://www.livestream.com/pccgeneralassembly/video?clipId=pla_51849559-fafe-483d-8e8d-26393e5e6670

In early July, Edundu SFHC participants hosted a Recipe Day for farmers in the surrounding villages. Recipe Days are held as an opportunity for farmers-men and women- to get together to cook and exchange their own recipes, farming tips and stories, and enjoy themselves in the process. We are pleased to say that there were 29 women, 15 men and 30 children (5-12 years old) attending. Both men and women took part in preparing and cooking soy milk, bean meat, futali (made from sweet potato), sorghum porridge, sorghum doughnuts and many more dishes. Rogers Msachi, our long-standing community promoter, encouraged couples to work together in food preparation and child feeding as both of them have gained knowledge on how to make different foods from the locally available farm produce. Mr. Emmanuel Chilanga, a Masters student at Western University and collaborating with SFHC, studying Recipe Days, also actively participated. There were many innovative and delicious dishes shared, and it was a fun, successful day.

Farmer promoters have been out in the field all week, doing teaching and demonstrating of legume crop residue burial in the new participating villages. The promoters visited all 20 villages, and did teaching on nitrogen fixation, the role of legume residue in improving the soil, and the importance of early incorporation. Some of their training built on a workshop on legumes and nitrogen fixation they had with Mary Parr, a collaborating graduate student, earlier this year. In some of the villages they visited, farmers had already incorporated the residue, which was exciting to observe.

Emmanuel Chilanga, a Masters student of geography at Western University, is coming to Ekwendeni this May to study the impacts of our participatory nutrition program, particularly recipe days, on household gender roles and child care practices. Emmanuel is a Malawian student funded through the McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, and his supervisor is Dr. Rachel Bezner Kerr. Emmanuel has been examined the literature on the division of labour and decision-making more broadly, and wants to apply theories of why people change household roles to the Ekwendeni context. He is looking forward to working closely with the SFHC team to understand how the participatory nutrition education program works, and what families learn when they participate in recipe days.

Dr. Raj Patel is a renowned scholar, writer and activist on food issues, and has published a well-known book “Stuffed and Starved” about global food inequalities. In a recent hour long program on the Canadian Broadcasting Radio radio program ‘Ideas’,(http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/04/20/feeding-ten-billion-1/) Dr. Patel discussed global food problems and possible solutions. Starting at the 32 minute mark, Dr. Patel discusses the recent history of agriculture in Malawi, and our work of SFHC is highlighted at the 40 minute mark as being a potential and exciting solution to food insecurity in the Global South.

We had many farmers, researchers, Ministry of Agriculture officials and hospital staff attend our field day in mid-March. Dr. Kanyama-Phiri and Dr. Patson Nalivata visited, along with many farmers from Ntcheu, and some visitors from an IDRC-funded project in Tanzania. Visitors were able to visit a variety of crops in the field, including sorghum, cowpea and doubled-up legumes, several people gave speeches at the end of the day, and there was a meal shared after the field day.

In June 2011 we organized a farmer exchange down to southern Malawi (Thyolo and Machinga) to learn more about what communities were doing with regards to climate change adaptation. We learned about how to make fuel efficient cooking stoves using local materials by building a kiln. The farmers who came on the exchange were very enthusiastic about this idea, since they linked the local deforestation with changes in micro climate. They got to work building a kiln and made twelve stoves. They intend to make over two hundred stoves and distribute it to farmers who are involved in the participatory research on climate change adaptation.

Rachel Bezner Kerr gave a presentation about some SFHC research findings on crop diversity and food security, at the annual meetings of the Ecological Society of America meetings in Austin Texas. The presentation was part of a session entitled “Revolutionary Ecology: Defining and Conducting Stewardship and Action as Ecologists and Global Citizens”. The presentation was based in part on a survey conducted by the SFHC team in collaboration with Dr. Sieglinde Snapp (Michigan State University) on crop diversity and soil health. There was lots of discussion and interest from the audience following the presentation.

Twelve farmers and staff traveled to Zambia this past week to take a five day course on sustainable agriculture. They were hosted by Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre, which has run various courses for farmers on sustainable agriculture for many years (see http://www.loyno.edu/~katc/aboutus.htm for more information about Kasisi). The experience was very fruitful and the farmers and staff will develop a training program for other Ekwendeni farmers based on what they learned. The training was funded through support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada.

The community promoters are visiting the 200 farmers doing participatory experiments on climate change adaptation to measure yields and assess the experiments to date. Lizzie Shumba, the SFHC Coordinator, is hopeful that the experiments will yield good results this year, as the rains were reasonable. We’ll be reporting back to the website in the coming months as to our results.