Rebecca Byerly reports for Voice of America on the struggling houseboat industry in Kashmir. This report is part of Pulitzer Center-sponsored project "Paradise Lost: Kashmir's Vanishing Glaciers, Waters, and Forests"
Fasting for Climate Change
William Wheeler: Producer/Editor
Anna-Katarina Gravgaard: Producer/Videographer
I left Africa last night with a great deal of gratitude for the people who have shared their stories with me, especially the farmers. Never have I encountered such a wide variety of experiences, skills and backgrounds, but all of them were willing, even eager, to share their thoughts with an American journalist. They include:
Janet Kaindu, who had lost her second crop in a row of maize and beans on her plot in Kenya's Rift
Thought moths were a threat to your clothes? They can devastate corn crops, too, and do in eastern and southern Africa. I got my first look at busseola fusca on Friday after hearing about ever since I arrived in Africa to look at the challenges facing farmers here and the potential for biotechnology to increase food production.
Less grass means fewer yaks. What will happen if the glaciers disappear?
Disputed territory faces challenges as impact of climate change begins to take its toll.
Isaac Khuto, 65, got a late start at farming, but he's making the most of it. Khuto, who has an eighth grade education and lived most of his life under the hated apartheid system. But now he's part of a slowly developing effort to help blacks obtain farmland in a way that avoid the wholesale grab of white farms that destroyed food production in Zimbabwe.
“That’s what this conference needs to be about—turning words into real action the day the conference is over."
Kenyans woke to a warning in the nation's largest newspaper, the Daily Nation, that the country could face "an unprecedented food crisis" next year because of the drought that still plagues the Rift Valley and other regions. The problem is that the rainy season is ending without the precipitation expected when farmers planted in October. The Kenyan government provided a billion shillings, or about $13 million, in farm inputs to encourage the October planting, according to the newspaper.
View the slideshow as it appears in The New York Times.
Sean Gallagher tasted sand as he focused his camera lens on a masked man who had emerged suddenly from the bright orange cloud that enveloped both of them. Unable to see more than a few yards in front of himself, Mr. Gallagher pressed the shutter and the man disappeared into the sandstorm, as if he had been an apparition.
Ask a typical American what corn means to him or her, and you're likely to get a blank stare, unless they've read The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's best seller, or watched a movie like Food Inc. That person may say corn has taken over the American diet, caused the U.S. obesity crisis and contributed to environmental degradation. Corn, after all, is used in some way to produce everything from meat to snack chips and soft drinks.
But ask poor east Africans what corn, or maize, means to them and they'll tell you it is what sustains life.
I know what a drought looks like, but I've never seen anything like the devastation to a portion of the Rift Valley near the Tanzania border.
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