Aid

The bitter battle that seed giants Monsanto Co. and Pioneer Hi-Bred wage for the hearts and pocketbooks of farmers doesn't end in the United States. They're going at it in Africa, too.

The profit potential in Africa is limited. Production of corn, the two companies' signature food crop, is dominated in Africa by poor, smallholder farmers, who often till two or three acres at the most. There is little commercial-scale corn production outside of South Africa.

The landscape in this area east of Johannesburg, a slightly rolling plain with fields of tall corn, could almost pass for the American Midwest. Except for one feature - the giant yellowish mounds that are remnants of abandoned gold mines.

Fog shrouds the terraced hills, and a stream is swollen from the rain that fell overnight, but the damage of a drought that left 10 million Kenyans dependent on food aid is still evident. On many of the small farms, the ground is bare at a time when corn crops should be several feet tall.

"We had no maize because we planted and there was no rain," said Victor Mutua, who feeds an extended family of 15 from his 20-acre plot.

In Iowa, corn is king. In eastern and southern Africa, it's more important than that.

Americans feed corn to livestock or turn it into motor fuel or a sweetener for soft drinks. Africans eat it. Every day, sometimes more than once.

There's nothing like rain to wreck the field trial of a crop designed to resist drought. So an arid plain south of Nairobi is considered a good place to test drought-resistant biotech corn seeds: It doesn't rain for six months at a time.

Those long dry periods allow scientists to test the crop by stopping irrigation during critical periods, such as when plants flower.

View the entire slide show at the Des Moines Register.

Andre Lambertson is a photojournalist whose work has appeared in publications such as TIME, US News & World Report and The New York Times Magazine. Previously, Lambertson worked on the Pulitzer Center reporting project "Scars and Stripes: Liberian Youth After the War."

In this interview, Lambertson talks about the significance of working on a year-long reporting project focusing on the rebuilding of Haiti.

In Ethiopia, farms backed by foreign investors are growing with abundance, while native farmers subsist on food aid. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports about the unlikely abundance in a land known for famine.

Click here to watch the video.

On Wednesday, April 14, PBS NewsHour aired Fred de Sam Lazaro's latest story from Kenya: a report on social entrepreneur and Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz. She's developed a new idea called "patient capital", that is funding innovative approaches in tackling some of the worlds most entrenched social problems. Also, a look at one man's vision for cleaner and greener public toilets in Kenya. It's part one of a two part series.

As Sudan gears up for Sunday's national elections, another landmark vote is on the horizon -- a referendum in January that will determine whether the south splits from the north.

Like the elections, the referendum is a key requirement of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, intended to give southerners a chance to decide if they will remain in a unity government with the north, or become an independent country.

But several major related issues are still up in the air, including where the north-south border actually is.

The village of Abyei had a population of about 30,000 when, in May 2008, violence broke out between government forces from the north and soldiers from the south, leveling the town and forcing the residents to flee to surrounding areas.

In the months since, the residents have been gradually moving back and rebuilding their lives. We spoke with some of the villagers and recorded their thoughts in the following Flipcam videos.

In May 2008, long-simmering tensions between the Sudan People's Liberation Army of the south and government forces from the north boiled over into violent clashes in the town of Abyei, causing an estimated 25,000 people to flee their homes.

They are gradually moving back to Abyei, located along the north-south border of Sudan. And efforts are underway to rebuild the town, including repairing roads and replacing the mud and thatched roof homes, known as tukuls. But still there are large swaths of barren land.