Tag Archives: Food Security

Double Your Impact In Guatemala

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Double your impact on hunger now! Thanks to a generous benefactor and international partners, your donation to Heifer International will be matched dollar-for-dollar during March to support food security, better nutrition and women’s empowerment in Guatemala.

Double your impact for people like Virginia Jimenez Mateo, who knows firsthand how women living in rural areas can become isolated and marginalized. She lives in the remote village of Laguna Verde, Guatemala, with her husband Mauricio and their seven sons.

Virginia Jimenez Mateo, Guatemala

Photo by Russell Powell, courtesy of Heifer International

Before joining a Heifer project in 2007, Virginia seldom left her house since women do most of the farm labor and household chores. She rarely had the opportunity to get to know other women in her community apart from church activities. “The only time I left my house was to go to church and back,” she said.

Virginia primarily prepared beans, steamed broccoli or carrots for meals. They had to buy eggs from their neighbors and could only afford meat twice a month. She recalls that 14-year-old Mario had stomach problems.

Since joining the project, she has received training along with 10 chickens in 2007 and a goat in 2011. She especially likes Passing on the Gift®. “It would be hard for me to save enough money to repay a goat, but when mine (kid born on February 14, 2012) is big enough I can pass it on,” she said, having already passed on the gift of chickens in 2008.

Heifer’s training improved life in the community. Training provided opportunities for the local women to get to know each other. “No one can take away the knowledge we received,” she said. Thanks to the gender training, the men have started participating. With more help around the house, Virginia’s family started to thrive.

Edwin Gonzalez Jimenez, Guatemala

“Part of the training was teaching my children than they can do anything a woman can do,” Virginia said.
Photo by Russell Powell, courtesy of Heifer International

The biggest benefit for her family, Virginia said, was their improved diet and nutrition. They raise their own chickens, so they no longer have to buy eggs and can now afford to buy meat once a week. “Now we have more variety,” she said. She noticed that they aren’t as sick as before. She credits drinking goat’s milk for her improved health and less aches in her joints.

Better nutrition means her sons have more energy to focus on their school work. Miguel, age 19, and Carlos, age 16, received scholarships to attend a Catholic school. “The knowledge and ethics they are receiving are important,” she said.

This kind of impact happens every day in Heifer projects. Stretch your dollar this month and double your impact to help provide the training and livestock needed by families like Virginia’s to help put more food on the table.

To maximize this match, we need to raise at least $831,000 from generous supporters like you.

Click here to donate.

Food Security in South Africa: A State of Crisis

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Food security in South Africa is more elusive than it may appear. Food security means knowing where your next meal is coming from. It means not having to worry about whether your children will get sick because they don’t have the right foods. Twenty years ago, most food insecure people in the world lived in the poorest nations. Today, on World Food Day, as much as three quarters of poor, food insecure households live in so-called Middle Income Countries like China, India and South Africa.

Help make food security in South Africa a reality

Photo courtesy of Heifer International South Africa

The South African government estimates that approximately 11 million people in South Africa are food insecure out of a population of 50 million. This is roughly 1 out of every 5 people. Children are particularly affected by food insecurity. More than 20% of children in South Africa suffer from stunting because of poor nutrition.

Although South Africa is a relatively wealthy country compared to many other countries on the African continent, the difficult history of apartheid has created a situation of extreme inequality. While some people can afford to eat in expensive restaurants, many others – often living just a few miles away – don’t know where their children’s next meal is coming from.

Food Security in South Africa: More Difficult for the Rural Poor

Rural South African families suffer the most. 70% of all poor people in South Africa live in rural communities. Most of them have a little bit of land and try to grow some food but their farming activities rarely meet even their basic food needs. These are the people Heifer International South Africa helps. Through improved agricultural production on a small scale, they can improve the food their families eat and produce a little bit extra to sell.
Over the past 12 years, Heifer International South Africa has seen the Heifer model work over and over again in South Africa. Julia Ngwana used to beg for work at her daughters’ school to be able to feed her family. Since joining Heifer’s Saambandou Project, she has been able not only to provide healthy food but also to send her youngest daughter, Dakalo, to university.

Mr Albert Makhohliso’s goat and vegetable production finally made it possible, at age 65, to earn enough income to support his sons’ education, after years of unemployment.
Mrs Nuleka Tinga, a single mother supporting 5 children and 4 grandchildren said, “It changed our lives for the better [when] I was given cows. I managed to feed my family and provide for them through the assistance of Heifer. I’m very grateful. Heifer helped me and my family very much; I was motivated to start my own homestead garden so that I could get nutrients from vegetables and sell them as well.” Mrs Tinga’s cow didn’t only help her family. As soon as her cow produced a female calf, she passed on (donated) the calf to another family, so that they, too, could enjoy the benefits. Mrs Tinga also passed on in June 2011.

South Africa’s thriving economy excludes people like Albert, Julia and Nuleka. No matter how hard they work, they simply do not have the skills, knowledge and resources to access the formal economy on their own. Through Heifer International South Africa’s projects, these poor, rural families can finally take part in economic development and benefit through increased production, earning an income and finally achieving regular access to healthy, tasty food for themselves and their families.

This World Food Day, support the work of Heifer to help make food security in South Africa a more attainable reality.

Heifer Welcomes G8 Commitment to Food Security, Nutrition

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Heifer project participant

A member of the Kamuyu Women's Development Organization with her infant among trellised Chinese beans in the collective gardening subsistence plot.

Heifer International applauds President Barack Obama’s announcement today that the Group of Eight Nations (G8) commits to bring the private sector, foundations, governments and civil society together in a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition for Africa. The commitment will help keep the promise of the 2009 L’Aquila Summit to, “act with the scale and urgency needed to achieve sustainable global food security.”

But more, it is a commitment that, though it begins with Africa and the pledge to lift 50 million people there out of poverty, can provide a global solution. By energizing and allying all sectors, assisted farmers can create a food revolution and help feed a hungry world.

Today, there are nearly three billion people struggling to survive on less than $2 a day—nearly half the world’s population—and 25,000 children continue to die daily needlessly from hunger-related issues.

There is a solution; one the world is finally coming around to—the smallholder farmer. Today there are 650 million limited resource farmers in the world who grow 70 percent of the food eaten every day. If working together we can help them simply double their production, they can feed themselves, their neighbors, the entire world.

The commitment is significant. So, too, must be the execution. The need and opportunity are both too great to fail.

As committed, the new alliance will:

  • Be rooted in partnership
  • Mobilize private capital for food security
  • Take innovation to scale
  • Reduce and manage risk
  • Improve nutritional outcome and reduce child stunting
  • Ensure accountability for results

This is both a critical and opportunistic time. For years, Heifer International has been a leader in what has been called the livestock revolution. We have historically worked on a scale proportional to our limited resources to help demonstrate to the world the power and potential of the rural, smallholder farmer—the majority of them women.

We believe that this commitment, this pledge to think differently, to act differently, will help prioritize investments that improve nutrition and specifically target small-scale farmers, particularly women, who form the backbone of agriculture in many developing nations and who play a critical role in transforming agriculture and building thriving economies.

Thrift Ensures Security in Honduras

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Following a recent Heifer Study Tour to Honduras, Virginia Tech students were given an assignment: Choose one photograph from the trip and explain why you chose it and which of Heifer’s 12 Cornerstones for Just and Sustainable Development it embodies. Over the course of this week, we’ll share these images and words to give you a look at how much of an impact seeing Heifer’s work in the field can have. Read other posts in the series here.

Thrift ensures security

Nate Foust-Meyer, Crops, Soils & Environmental Sciences, VA Tech: The difference between ingenuity and necessity became blurry during my time in Honduras. The bio-digester we helped install was built gracefully. Pieced together with old tires, pvc , plastic sleeves, and a coke bottle it was effective, rustic and beautiful. It was seldom clean cut, but always worked and always used materials efficiently. In this image a heifer is feeding on corn stalks. The red apparatus in front of it is used to remove the outer fruit from the coffee beans. Since the picture was taken in March, the end of the coffee season and therefore the time when income begins to shrink, families whose only source of income or sustenance is coffee will likely begin to grow hungry–but others, like the one that this cow belongs to will do better. The education, training, and sense of empowerment that comes with a heifer project also brings a sense of security; knowing that their food is available and not unaffordable  has freed the people in this community from the bondage of worry and fear. The sense of constant thrift and inventiveness is necessary to the people of rural Honduras. They use the supplies they have to feed those they love as best they can. It is their thrift that ensures their security.

Food Sovereignty on Horseback

Rial Tombes, Enviromental Policy & Planning, VA Tech: This picture was taken on the first day that we arrived in Trinidad de Copan. It was Tuesday evening, around 5:00, and one of the first things we did was walk down the dirt road from our hostel to visit the town boot maker. The Boot shop was small. A few people in our group decided to buy a pair. Those not getting their feet sized were milling around outside. It started to drizzle. We were still getting used to our surroundings and because of that felt like it was ok to look over walls into people’s backyard and look at their chickens, goats, pigs, etc.

In the distance, the group started to see a man riding down the road atop his horse carrying a bundle of corn. I can only imagine that he was on his way home from a long day of work in the fields. This man provided us all with a reminder that we were in Honduras, where having goats in your backyard, riding to and from work on horseback, and waking up to the crowing of multiple town rooster was normal. After our long journey from Tegucigalpa to Trinidad, it was this moment where I understood that I was not in Virginia anymore. I believe the CAFS cornerstone, Food Security and Food Sovereignty is showcased beautifully in this picture. This man is living his life with the hope of providing for his family and contributing to a strong local economy. Also the Heifer cornerstone, Sustainability and Self Reliance, is represented here because somebody had to harvest to corn and bring it to market or to the family table.

VA Tech Students Transformed by Trip to Honduras

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Following a recent Heifer Study Tour to Honduras, Virginia Tech students were given two assignments. First, sum up the experience in just one word:

Honduras in One Word

Second, choose one photograph from the trip and explain why you chose it and which of Heifer’s 12 Cornerstones for Just and Sustainable Development it embodies. Over the course of this week, we’ll share these images and words to give you a look at how much of an impact seeing Heifer’s work in the field can have. Here is the first installment:

Food Security

S. Abbott, Human Nutrition, Foods & Exercise; VA Tech: Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to the country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. –Thomas Jefferson

This photograph was taken on the last day we worked in the Copantle community in Honduras. I like the way it captures Angelina and Michelle working alongside each other in Angelina’s garden. This image speaks to the Heifer Cornerstone, Sustainability & Self-Reliance. In the classes I have taken for the Civic Agriculture and Food Systems minor at Virginia Tech, we have had a lot of discussions about how “sustainable” agriculture should be defined, about the threefold social, ecological and economic components. Sustainable agriculture enables citizens to meet present-day needs without degrading the resources left for future generations. The agroecological principles we saw being put to use in Angelina’s garden and fields are sustainability and ecological stewardship in action. After our first day of work in Copantle, Angelina gave us a tour of her land and it was incredible to see the principles of ecological agriculture I have learned about being used in this Honduran community. The steep slopes that overlook Angelina’s community are planted with pineapple, banana, plantain, coffee bushes. The biodiversity here is intentional and incredible to see. Every plant chosen is there for a reason, which Angelina shared with us: the pineapple, for instance, provides natural terracing on the slope. This photo also embodies Food Security/Food Sovereignty, a core value of the Civic Agriculture and Food Systems minor. Food security essentially means knowing where your next meal is coming from. Food sovereignty refers to having access to food that is healthy and culturally appropriate, and that is produced in environmentally and socially responsible ways. A community with food sovereignty also has the ability to define their own food system. From what I saw in Copantle and heard from Angelina about her vision for continuing to build upon the resources that they have, I would say that this community is definitely on the right track for achieving food sovereignty. Heifer International’s mission is “to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth.” Seeing the civic agriculture in the Copantle community, thanks in no small part to Angelina’s tireless efforts, has allowed me to understand why “caring for the Earth” is a vital part of Heifer’s mission statement. Hunger and poverty cannot be eliminated if we do not take care of the Earth. Healthy communities are built upon healthy soils.